Month: January 2009

A comment on my last post noted that there were no
sample chapters available for the book, however I just
noticed that Wiley has posted some samples on the
book’s
webpage.

The samples include
chapter one,
the
index,
and the
detailed table of contents.

The index and TOC are probably the best sections for getting a feel for the
material in the book. This is actually the first time I’ve seen the index myself,
since it was produced after we finished writing and the final pages were nailed
down. I haven’t reviewed it closely yet, but at first glance it looks to be
pretty comprehensive at 35 pages. I’ve always thought that the index was
critical for a book like this. The detailed TOC is also useful for getting a sense of
the topics covered in each chapter.

2008 was a busy year for me since I spent most of my free
time co-authoring a book on OpenSolaris; the
OpenSolaris Bible.

Having never written a book before, this was a new experience for me.
Nick originally had
the idea for writing a book on OpenSolaris and he’d already published
Professional C++ with Wiley,
so he had an agent and a relationship with a publisher. In December 2007 he contacted
me about being a co-author and after thinking it through, I agreed. I had
always thought writing a book was something I wanted to do, so I was
excited to give this a try. Luckily,
Dave agreed to be the
third author on the book, so we had our writing team in place. After
some early discussions, Wiley decided our material fit best into their
“Bible” series, hence the title.

In early January 2008 the three of us worked on the outline and decided which chapters
each of us would write. We actually started writing in early
February of 2008. Given the publishing schedule we had with Wiley, we had
to complete each chapter in about 3 weeks, so there wasn’t a lot of time to
waste. Also, because this project was not part of our normal work for
Sun, we had to ensure that we only worked on the book on our own time, that is evenings and
weekends. In the end it turned out that we each wrote
exactly a third of the book, based on the page counts.
Since the book came out at around 1000 pages, with approximately
950 pages of written material, not counting front matter or the index,
we each wrote over 300 pages of content. Over the course of the project we were
also fortunate that many
of our friends and colleagues who work on OpenSolaris were willing to review
our early work and provide much useful feedback.

We finished the first draft at the end of August 2008 and worked on the revisions
to each chapter through early December 2008. Of course the
OpenSolaris 2008.11
release came out right at the end of our revision process, so we had to scramble
to be sure that everything in the book was up-to-date with respect to the new
release.

From a personal perspective, this was a particularly difficult year because we
also moved to a “new” house in April of 2008. Our new house is actually about
85 years old and hadn’t been very well maintained for a while, so it needs some
work. The first week we moved in, we had the boiler go out, the sewer back up
into the basement, the toilet and the shower wouldn’t stop running, the
electrical work for our office took longer than expected, our DSL wasn’t hooked
up right, and about a million other things all seemed to go wrong. Somehow we
managed to cope with all of that, keep working for our real jobs, plus I was able
to finish my chapters for the book on schedule. I’m pretty sure
Sarah
wasn’t expecting anything like this when I talked to her about working on the book
the previous December.
Needless to say, we’re looking forward to a less hectic 2009.

If you are at all interested in OpenSolaris, then I hope you’ll find something in our
book that is worthwhile, even if you already know a lot about the OS. The book is
targeted primarily at end-users and system administrators. It has
a lot of breadth and we tried to include a balanced mix of introductory material as well as advanced
techniques. Here’s the table of contents so you can get a feel for whats in the book.

I. Introduction to OpenSolaris.
1. What Is OpenSolaris?
2. Installing OpenSolaris.
3. OpenSolaris Crash Course.
II. Using OpenSolaris
4. The Desktop.
5. Printers and Peripherals.
6. Software Management.
III. OpenSolaris File Systems, Networking, and Security.
7. Disks,  Local File Systems, and the Volume Manager.
8. ZFS.
9. Networking.
10. Network File Systems and Directory Services.
11. Security.
IV. OpenSolaris Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability.
12. Fault Management.
13. Service Management.
14. Monitoring and Observability.
15. DTrace.
16. Clustering for High Availability.
V. OpenSolaris Virtualization.
17. Virtualization Overview.
18. Resource Management.
19. Zones.
20. xVM Hypervisor.
21. Logical Domains (LDoms).
22. VirtualBox.
VI. Developing and Deploying on OpenSolaris.
23. Deploying a Web Stack on OpenSolaris.
24. Developing on OpenSolaris.

If this looks interesting, you can pre-order a copy from Amazon
here. It comes out early next month, February 2009, and
I’m excited to hear peoples reaction once they’ve actually had a chance to look
it over.