The AIX Survival Guide

Accelerating AIX : Performance Tuning for Programmers and Systems Administrators

Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting

Essential System Administration, Third Edition

Aix

AIX 5L Administration

Format: Paperback
Author: Randal K. Michael
ReleaseDate: 02 August, 2002
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Rating:

Techno shock
I got pretty good at installations, SNA services, peripherals and applications. I used AIX in the mid 90's. Since them I switched to HP/UX and moves from version 9 to 10 to 11; so I am familiar with today's systems.

Well it is a shocker but once again the AIX technology and their thrust into Linux and more web based applications, not to mention hardware technology has once again leapfrogged past me in the AIX field.

The book itself is appropriately designed to bring you up to snuff as of its printing. The main thing about this book is that it assumes that you already know UNIX systems administration and some of the older versions of AIX as it the commands and locations shown do not have any explanation. The differences however are described in detail.

Still the one advantage of SMIT and WebSM is that they are a good starting point and with a little tweaking you can bypass them next time with greater precision.

Regardless of where you are on the AIX food chain this book is more than just a helpful reference for your library.
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A Decent Admin book for AIX
I gave it to one of my Admins that came on board with no AIX experience to acquaint him with the environment. I manage both Solaris and AIX servers and found this book to be a useful guide for beginning admins (not many AIX books to choose from though). It's a decent reference. No substitute for training though.

a powerful version of Unix
Its SMIT user interface for the sysadmin was quite well done. When I used AIX in the mid 90s, it was probably the most advanced unix operating system generally available. Here, you can see much of that. IBM continued to improve AIX. SMIT is shown as relieving you of the burden of knowing and typing some very long command lines.

However, this book was written in 02. When IBM was already consolidating its operating systems towards linux. Hence the heavy linux discussion in the book. Probably, much of what the book describes that is specific to AIX then is still being supported under whatever AIX you get now with your machine.