The Practice of System and Network Administration

What Hacker News says

1. eitlandOct 2025
   "The practice of System and Network administration" by Tom Limoncelli and Christine Hogan[1] was, together with "Principles of Network and Systems Administration" by Mark Burgess have probably been the books that influenced my approach to sysadmin the most. I still have them. Between them they covered at a high level (at least back when I was sysadmin before devops and Kubernets etc) anything and everything from

   - hardware, networks, monitoring, provisioning, server room locations in existing buildings, how to prepare server rooms

   - and so on up to hiring and firing sysadmins, salary negotiations[2], vendor negotiations and the first book even had a whole chapter dedicated to "Being happy"

   [1] There is a third author as well now, but those two were the ones that are on the cover of my book from 2005 and that I can remember

   [2] Has mostly worked well after I more or less left sysadmin behind as well

   Show morethread
2. jlduggerJan 2023
   Books will take you pretty far:

   - UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook

   - The Practice of System and Network Administration

   - The Practice of Cloud System Administration

   - Tannenbaum's textbooks (operating systems / networks)

   - Readings in Database Systems

   Show morethread
3. asmrOct 2022
   Both SRE and DevOps are essentially evolved sysadmin roles. The DevOps philosophy is cross-functional and many sysadmins have adopted a DevOps approach. The latest edition of the classic sysadmin book "The Practice of System and Network Administration" is now centered around DevOps.
   thread
4. dsr_Jun 2022
   It was a whole zoo of O'Reilly books, including

   UNIX Systems Administration

   The Perl Cookbook

   DNS and BIND

   AWK

   and too late for me to learn the basic, but valuable nonetheless: The Practice of System and Network Administration.

   Show morethread
5. andresgaitanNov 2021
   3 year Linux Sysadmin, here my 2c:

   Buy ASAP both "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook" and "Practice of System and Network Administration".

   UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook -> Will give you the necessary tech skills and concepts. This is a sysadmin bootcamp.

   Practice of System and Network Administration -> Will show you how to the job right. This is more like 'how to manage' an operations team.

   Each book is massive and will take you 1 month to read. I suggest you start with UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook.

   Show morethread
6. fauriaMay 2020
   I haven't read it, but also heard good things about "The Practice of System and Network Administration", by the same author: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practice-System-Network-Administrat...
   thread