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FreeBSD Unleashed (2nd Edition)
by Brian Tiemann, Michael Urban
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Sams (2003-05-05)
ISBN: 0672324563
EAN: 9780672324567
UPC: 752063324561
Dewey Decimal #: 005.44769
Paperback: 1008 pages
Edition: 2
SKU: 110508000065
Condition: New
Comments: 0672324563 New, never read, may have minor wear on cover.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
FreeBSD is a freely available Unix system based on the BSD distribution from the University of California at Berkeley. It is an open source project developed by volunteers all over the world. FreeBSD is extremely robust and powers some of the largest Internet sites in the world, including Yahoo! and the Internet Movie Database. It has also been used for other high-end applications, such as special effects rendering in movies. The special effects in The Matrix were rendered on a cluster of FreeBSD systems. FreeBSD Unleashed, 2/e teaches the reader everything he or she needs to know in order to use FreeBSD to its full potential. It shows individuals how to put to use the same FreeBSD power that many high-profile Internet sites depend on to work. Whether someone needs and enterprise class server, a small business server, or a dependable workstation, this book provides a powerful solution to the reader's needs.
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Amazon.com Review
Because it's very popular among Internet service providers (ISPs), FreeBSD is likely the Unix flavor you work with when you Telnet into the server that hosts a Web site. For that reason, it's worth having FreeBSD Unleashed around if you frequently need to log in to various hosted environments but don't do your day-to-day work on a FreeBSD computer. If you're running FreeBSD on your own machine--and more than a few Linux critics say you should be--you'll get even more out of this book, particularly if you prefer to have your reference materials on paper. It's a good idea to have them that way when you're having problems getting FreeBSD to connect to the Internet, after all.This book explains, succinctly, how to do basic utilitarian stuff like moving files and creating users, and advanced utilitarian stuff like "building the world" from raw source. Further, the authors explain Unix concepts (like the shell and its relationship to the kernel) clearly and in ample detail. Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann also go beyond FreeBSD itself, explaining such concepts as wide area networks (WANs) and basic, environment-neutral Perl programming. Whether these inclusions are valuable extras or extraneous padding depends upon your perspective, but there's no doubt that the authors maintain a high quality standard throughout their documentation of FreeBSD and its allied technologies. --David Wall Topics covered: Using and enjoying the FreeBSD flavor of Unix, with emphasis on versions 4.4 and 5.0. Instructions and explanations--all rather detailed--appear on installing the operating system, configuring groups and users, setting up daemons (including those for network services like mail), and connecting to other computers (as well as the Internet). Installable copies of FreeBSD 4.4 and 5.0 ship with this book.
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Customer Reviews
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I'm reading this cover-to-cover!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-05-24
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is an excellent book! It explains many things I've noticed but didn't comprehend well in FreeBSD and Linux. The authors are very gifted at communicating, a rare gift concerning tech book and online doc authors (generally, such works so dull, they may merely serve (too often) as ambiguous reference material). The authors also give some interesting history about FreeBSD and its competitors; they give a very compelling case for the OS, which was first being developed in the era of the first moon landing and in the heart of the cold war.
The authors give the steps for setting up the GUI, and many options for this (this is bedeviling for many of us--a default GUI doesn't "pop-up" after install as in commercially-supported Linux, Windows, and the Mac OS--one "builds" the GUI from a low level with desired features), and, also, the authors explain the reasons for having to set up the GUI (the OS is favored by server users who prefer a lean command-line interface).
The bewildering VI editor is thoughtfully explained in some detail as well: It is a high-powered, yet, heavily keyboard-command dependent (and user-unfriendly) text editor that often is necessary for system configuration and software development. It's not user friendly (or "intuitive") because it was developed in the aforementioned cold-war era of really limited computer power and storage: Needless to say, it hasn't changed much....
The book, which I haven't yet finished but am eagerly reading daily, gives many caveats (such as configuring the sync settings of monitors correctly). FreeBSD is not a good OS for a PC newbie to learn to use (at least not without a knowledgeable mentor); nevertheless, I think this is a very good intro book for gamers and high-level techies--these may wish to use FreeBSD in advanced ways such as for servers, developing firewalls, as well as for common internet/e-mail and other networking tasks (such tasks are inherently more secure and speedy on FreeBSD)--or for those well-exposed to Linux, or Apple OSX--cousin-OSes or, in the latter case, a direct descendant....
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A Good Book
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-01-09
1 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
The book was comprehensive and showed me enough to use FreeBSD effectively.
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Fantastic!!!
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-09-24
0 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book is wonderful for the beginner who already knows about the ins and outs of computers. I installed freeBSD and was so impressed that I bought this book. It has already been an asset and I have learned a ton about this operating system and I am only in Chapter 4!
Worth the money, it is in-depth and doesn't miss a step so far!
Best Wishes On Your FreeBSD Adventure!!! Microsoft won't know what hit 'em!
This book is a good referance for newbies and hardened geeks alike!
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If you're new to FreeBSD, you will like it.
Rating  (4)
Date: 2006-09-08
8 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book isn't for me.
You would think a FreeBSD book in 2006 will tell you things like how to keep your system safe with binary updates, or walk you through a decent CUPS installation, or mention using OpenBSD's firewall tool. It's just the same-old same-old. There's little here that can't be learned from the Handbook or Greg Lehey's The Complete FreeBSD. And both are free. To be fair, there is new stuff here, like installing the official Sun JDK port for FreeBSD, or using portupgrade, but I expected a little more thoroughness and variation in choices in the areas of security, ports and printing. Also, I think a chapter about contributing to the FreeBSD ports tree would have been good to have.
However, if you're new to Unix/FreeBSD, than I think you will enjoy the chatty style instead of the rather more terse style of The Handbook.
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I think that is a good book
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-07-18
1 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
I preorder this book, and waited by 2 months until it was published, but FreeBSD 6 really was a good choice. It is well wrote, but for my is necessary a better chapter reference, because I used it like a reference book and some time I need to look in the entire book to find a specific topic.
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