16 Linux Books and Videos for System Administrator

Having knowledge of Linux is essential for any system administration, middleware, web engineer job.

Linux is used almost everywhere in production or a non-production environment. There are thousands of article, book, video training to explore and learn but that would be time-consuming.

Instead, you can follow one or two related books or online training.

The following learning materials cover a large number of Linux Administration tasks from beginning to expert level. So pick the one suits you.

Source: 16 Linux Books and Videos for System Administrator

Deploy and Maintain Redmine, the Right Way

Jens Krämer wrote this nice guide to deploying and maintaining Redmine the right way.  This is basically a combination of the official Redmine documentation with a variety of guides on deploying and running a generic Ruby on Rails application.  The solution is rightfully focusing on git, combining the upstream patches with your own changes.  And given that this is “the right way”, you don’t even have to have any of your own changes.  Just being prepared for some is good.

Once you’ve setup the proper environment, you can further automate the deployment of Redmine with Capistrano.  If you don’t use Capistrano for whatever reason – no worries, the process is easily adoptable to whatever build/deploy tool you are using.

Making “Push on Green” a Reality

Making “Push on Green” a Reality is an insider look at how Google handles continuous deployment.  Very few teams and companies need to deal with such level of complexity, but the overall principals still probably apply.

Updating production software is a process that may require dozens, if not hundreds, of steps. These include creating and testing new code, building new binaries and packages, associating the packages with a versioned release, updating the jobs in production datacenters, possibly modifying database schemata, and testing and verifying the results. There are boxes to check and approvals to seek, and the more automated the process, the easier it becomes. When releases can be made faster, it is possible to release more often, and, organizationally, one becomes less afraid to “release early, release often”. And that’s what we describe in this article—making rollouts as easy and as automated as possible. When a “green” condition is detected, we can more quickly perform a new rollout. Humans are still needed somewhere in the loop, but we strive to reduce the purely mechanical toil they need to perform.

Linux Inside – A book-in-progress about the Linux kernel and its internals

Linux Inside” is a book-in-progress about the Linux kernel and its internals.  You can read it online or download as a PDF.  It’s also available in several languages.  Some of the things that you’ll find inside are:

  • The boot process
  • Initialization
  • Interrupts
  • System calls
  • Timers and time management
  • Synchronization primitives
  • Memory management
  • SMP
  • Data structures in the Linux kernel
  • … and more.

 

A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

I came across the second edition of the Prentice Hall’s “A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming” by Mark G. Sobell (original link).  This is a rather lengthy book at just over 1,000 pages, covering everything from history of Linux and basic commands, all the way to bash, Perl, and sed, and how things work both on the inside and outside.

It’s probably not one of those books to read from cover to cover, but quite handy to keep as a reference and flip a few pages once in a while.