Open Source Books

I bought this book because it has good reviews. I hope I can learn somethings from this book, but I had spend hours read this book until fall sleep and still don't get it. This book has no step by step instruction. This is the worst book I ever bought.

Tony Mullen takes the guess work out of long prosaic tutorials that sometimes can confuse a beginner. Anyone who has ever used other expensive animation programs will be amazed at the functional integration that Blender offers the beginner and more advanced user.

This book takes you from step by step toolbox explanations to jumpstarting a project - in an afternoon. All you need is a decent video card, enough hard drive space and this book!!!! For those advanced enough to go beyond the confines of this book, additional podcasts exist on iTunes and websites devoted to this niche.

Unleashing your imagination with Blender is an inexpensive way to explore the world of animation - This book is written for beginner and technical neophyte as long as you have some basic knowledge of Photoshop.

This is an awsome book for the beginning or intermediate Blenderhead. It might even be useful for the advanced user. I think it is the best book for someone who has worked with blender, learned some of the tools but needs to tie the concepts together. Yes you can probably learn the same concepts from online tutorials and the wiki but those tend to be somewhat disjointed. The book is clearly written and easy to follow. How complete it is probably depends on how advanced you are and what you are trying to do. If you are new to modeling it will keep you busy for a while.
What's wrong with this book? This book is defective. As stated by many others the included DVD is destroyed. The DVD has been incorporated into the binding of the book so not only is the DVD useless but removing the DVD may actually destroy the book binding. This book probably should be recalled by the publisher and rebound. The publisher is very good about sending a new DVD, a simple email and they send you a new one,free no questions. Is the DVD important? Maybe. The software is freely available on the net, however the files for the book are useful. Another problem with this book is the screen captures. Most blender books share this problem. The gray blender background does not reproduce well. There are times when the author indictates that vert placement is important but it is hard to tell from the picture where exactly the verts are. The DVD files may help with that.
So, this is a must have book for those trying to get their head around blender, one star off for poor production values.

I never did any character modeling before reading this book,and it got me going on. It was a great introduction to the whole world of modeling and animation and to the world of Blender. The text is easy to follow and understand. It is heavily supported by step-by-step screen shots and very well guided through. At the end of the modeling part, the author gives tips and solutions to common modeling "mistakes", like faces facing in the wrong direction etc. That was great, as there was no need to use Google. So what I'm saying here is that the author was expecting a newbie like me to read the book :).

My only regret is that the author decided to model a cartoon character and not a real human; perhaps he could've got a little more realistic and put a bit more emphasis into human muscles and structure. On the other hand, as the title says, this is an "Introduction to character animation", so that's the reason why he picked a cartoon character and focused more on the animation part.

Conclusion: great book !

I just received Introducing Character Animation with Blender. The book seems very well written and well illustrated. I have only made it through part of the first chapter, but if I don't learn character animation, it will be my fault, not the book's. Two amazing things: 1. The book had no CD. Nothing. 2. I fired off an email to Tony Mullen complaining about this fact. Within hours, I got a response, and an attachment containing the files I needed. You should definitely buy a book from an author who cares that much for his customers.

nice examples to dive into and get a whole view of the language in very short time. but not recommended for newcomers in programming.

Although this book is only a quick approach to python it makes the reader have a good background to continue learning python on itself.

I have experience with Fortran, some C/C++, but mostly IDL, a commercial scripting language for scientific visualization. I'm interested in Python because its an open source scripting language.

At the very least, skim the free online version before buying it. I got a copy from a friend and found it tough going. The first chapter 'dives' right into dictionaries and I didn't find it clear at all. Didn't make it past the first 2 or 3 chapters before looking for something else. The visual layout could also be better.

This book should have been called "Wade Into the Shallow End of Python." Virtually every section is punctuated by a statement to the effect of "I don't really understand how this crazy stuff works, either, so here's some other books you can read instead of this one if you want to learn anything" and it's probably the best advice the author has to offer. Numerous features of the language are glanced over or even omitted entirely just so we can enjoy three chapters worth of pointless RSS feed parsing examples and repeated exposure to a textual rendering of the author's extensive collection of obscure techno music. Rudimentary features of regular expressions are also over-explained ad infinitum despite the fact that this book is meant to target developers with experience in other programming languages. If they really needed to pad the content that much then why not cover things like metaclasses or the new generator features or pretty much anything useful?

It gets an extra star simply because it contains no painful-to-read Monty Python references which stopped being funny around 1985; something the official documentation cannot claim.

Pros:
1) The book does what the title promises - dives head in.
2) It introduces relatively wide range of topics in a readable manner.
3) Uses reasonably sized code examples
4) The writing is pretty clear and understandable
5) Has practical tidbits occasionally comparing similar functionality against C, C++, Java and Perl. Nice.
6) Provides links to further reading on a topic. Also very nice.

Cons:
1) Most topic discussions are a bit shallow and incomplete. For example it would be nice to present the reader with a comprehensive list of 'stuff' that may be done with a list, string, tuple, etc.
2) While there is a chapter on optimization, Mark doesn't mention the python profiler. I could live with that but there is no mentioning of python debugger (pdb) and there is nothing in the book about logging, either. These should not be considered 'advanced topics' and left out as they are helpful tool in learning any language (my opinion).
3) The book examples follow the 'Look at this cool yet obfuscated stuff I can do with Python - and oh, BTW, this is what it really means' methodology. While the follow-up discussions are reasonable, I would much more appreciate an explanation or at least mentioning of a concept before I get hit by a semi-cryptic line of code. On the other hand, the code is well annotated.
4) Mark uses repetitive examples to illustrate a point. 'This is how to do something', followed by 'This is how to do it better', followed by 'This is how to do it really well'. While illustrative of potential pitfalls, bugs or code deficiencies, this kind of writing makes it impractical to use the book as a reference. Open the book at the wrong page and follow the less than perfect example. Not a good thing. And boring - if I wanted to see it done the wrong way I'd use perl ;-).
5) Mark's statement that C++ virtual methods: 'confuse the hell out of me' (pg. 84) is rather amusing. I'd suggest to skip the amusement as it doesn't give a casual reader a whole lot of confidence in author's understanding of method overloading. Humor me some other ways.
However, this book is about Python, not C++, so I don't hold it against the author :)

In conclusion:
Quite reasonable book for the money, gets you a pretty good jumpstart. Coming from C/C++ background, general programming concepts are not totally lost on me and there are enough practical differences between Python and C++ that this book was worth the read.

The chapters on HTML, XML and SOAP were the primary reason I bought this book. Again, while not covered in depth, I got enough from them to get started with a small practical application.

If you're serious about developing any kind of meaningful code this is a reasonable start but you'll need to dig deeper.

I recently opted for buying Wesley Chun's Core Python Programming as it covers more topics in greater depth (it's the details that matter a lot) in quite comprehensive manner while still very understandable by a novice programmer.

O'Reilley's Python Cookbook by Alex Martelli et. al is also a very good complementary reading exposing quite imaginative ways of using even some very basic capabilities of Python.

This book is definitely a must have for all CVS users. Highly recommended.

The author made a deadly mistake. He said "cvs update -j branch" will not work for multiple times merge and use "cvs update -j change_tag_2 -j change_tag_1" instead. But the right answer is that "cvs update -j branch" will remember the last time stop point and start there. No repeat over problem at all. And "cvs update -j change_tag_2 -j change_tag_1" command will undo all chnge made between that two version.
This is not trival error, is'it?

The book looks to be well written with lots of details, but I feel the first few introductory pages are insufficiently detailed which prevented me from setting things up. Specifically:

* The examples don't say whether your supposed to be in or above the working directory for various cvs commands. The reader is supposed to assume that current directory for this example is the same place as the current directory at the end of the previous example, but nothing says that. (it's obvious once you know).

* The overview chapter only talks about importing a whole directory tree. It's not clear how to add a directory or a file to an already imported directory tree. Actually, it's explained 20 pages later, but I didn't find that for a while.

* I made a mistake and imported a working dir subdirectory as a top level directory in the central cvs repository. There's no quick overview commands for removing setup mistakes. (Actually, that's shown about 30 pages after the overview). The book doesn't say that importing a subdirectory if you're in the subdirectory, makes it a top level directory in the CVS repository.

I'm sure once I understand what's going on, it'll be obvious. But to do my basic directory setup, and cleanup from a mistake, I had to wade through all sorts of "once it's working" text to find what I wanted.

Also, in the Removing Directories section, he keeps referring to directories without saying whether he's referring to directories in the user tree or under the CVS repository tree.

I've used cvs for a couple of years, but have never really needed tagging or branching until I became a developer on the www.mycibavision.com project. Then, we needed it. Tagging and branching were difficult to grasp for me. This book was critical in helping me to understand what tagging and branching were and how to do use those features.
Aside from that, the main reason I like this book so much is that _everything_ has example code to go with it. Even better is that the output from every command is displayed as well. I found myself executing the commands and then comparing the output. I would highly recommend this book.

I cannot over-emphasize how useful this book was to me while setting up my cvs repository on Linux. All the examples were germane and were correct, and the gotcha-s were highlighted. I go back to this book all the time. I cannot make any comment regarding the worthiness of this book for folks trying to install cvs on NT, as I blithely skipped over any NT commentary, but as far as Linux/UNIX installation, the book was vital. I fully agree with the high rating this book has enjoyed.

This is easily the best book I've found on PHP for beginners. It's not the only book I'm using, but boy am I glad I started here. I have several years of experience with HTML, CSS, and ASP, and have recently decided to learn PHP/MySQL. If you have some background in web design, and want to learn PHP, David Powers is your man. Keep writing David!

This book is easy to read and easy to follow. The only downside is there are now review questions or tests at the end of the chapter to test yourself on what you've read.

I purchesed this book hoping it would give good examples. NOT!!! Just another book for people who already know what they are doing. Now this is my opinion and this book did nothing to help explain the INCLUDE function or how to handle directories in php which is the help I was looking for.

I decided I wanted to add PHP to my website to make it more dynamic and reduce maintenance. But I didn't know any PHP. So I picked up PHP Solutions and within an hour or two of opening the front cover, I had converted my website to PHP and added several dynamic features that were demonstrated in the book!

This book is brilliant. It provides a good background and understanding of PHP and the examples are easy to follow and apply straight away. It also shows you how to keep your code safe and avoid ugly error messages.

This is my first book on learning PHP, so maybe that's why it was difficult for me, but I would often give up on something, then search the web or other books for a tutorial, only to find that the answers were in this book all along.

I wanted to create an image gallery using php, and found a halfway decent tutorial on the net, but didn't realize that this book actually covers image galleries.

Some nice tutorials in this book revolve around,

- blogs
- event lists
- user registrations
- file uploads
- image galleries
- and a bunch of other stuff.

If your learning PHP this is a good book to buy, even if you don't understand everything, you can bounce around to different books or online tutorials, then refer back to this book and maybe it'll make more sense.

Information presented is solid for an older distribution, but is not relevant for v8.04. Ubuntu has made significant changes in the installation , partitioning, and setup areas - none of which are covered in this version of Ubuntu Hacks. Most serious is the omission of problems using the partition manager with ntfs partitions.

Well worth the money. This book is clear, informative, accurate, and well-written. Used in conjunction with "The Official Ubuntu Book", someone new to Ubuntu Linux will be up and running in no time, and able to do some very useful tweaking. This book addresses many practical issues to turn the standard Ubuntu install into a much more versatile machine. Very helpful for the basic administrative tasks as well. Highly Recommended.

I did not read this book cover-to-cover. I bounced around reading the chapters that interested me. Good stuff.

The book contains useful detail regarding common problems or tasks. It contained some answers that I needed at the moment, which left me pleased. I recommend combining Hacks with another general-overview Ubuntu book.

Some books contain numerous errors. I am too new to Ubuntu to review the accuracy of the step-by-step procedures in this book.

It is a slow read and really doesn't help you to understand what you are doing.

"Ubuntu Hacks" shows its age, but still packs a lot of useful information. The authors chose to base their hacks on the 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu, which is supported by Canonical until June 2011. As of this writing, Canonical has released version 7.10 and is actively working on the next version, Herdy Heron.

Still, this book remains about 90% accurate (IMO). In most of the places where it is no longer accurate things have actually become easier to accomplish in the newer versions. For example, it is much easier in 7.10 to enable restricted drivers than it was in 6.06.

Highs:
* Focused on how things are done in Ubuntu.
* Still useful despite its age.
* Something for every level of user, but newer users will get more out of it.

Lows:
* True experts in Ubuntu may find themselves skipping a few chapters. I was able to find helpful tidbits in chapters I thought I could skip, however.
* The various authors have wildly different writing styles. A couple of the hacks could have had more information or detail, but most were well-written.

Overall, I recommend this book if you are seriously considering or already using Ubuntu as your primary OS on any machine. Ubuntu has been compared to Mac OS X in its look and feel. "Ubuntu Hacks" can be compared to a slim version of "The Macintosh Bible" for Ubuntu.

Very well structured book with clear examples. Serves good as a reference and starting point for network programers. Highly recommended book.

This book was the perfect reference manual for the busy network administrator that needs to quickly create powerful tools to enforce and monitor network security. From concept to implementation Schiffman will give you a thorough understanding of why and how to create open-sourced security tools that you can start using immediately. Using this book as a reference I was able to create a customized network sniffer and a few vulnerability analysis tools. Another great addition to my library that I highly recommend.

Books on hacking, cracking, exploiting, and breaking software seem to get all of the attention in the security world. However, we need more works like Mike Schiffman's 'Building Open Source Network Security Tools' (BOSNST). I regret having waited so long to read BOSNST, but I'm glad I did. Schiffman's book is for people who want to build, not break, software, and the way he describes how to create tools is enlightening.

The major theme I captured from BOSNST was the importance of creating useful code libraries. Six of the book's 12 chapters focus on libraries which provide functions for application programmers. While not all have gained the same amount of fame or use, the author's approach remains sound. Libraries are the building blocks around which numerous tools can and should be built.

This theme helped me understand the evolution of RFP's Whisker CGI scanner, released in Oct 1999 and deprecated in May 2003. Whisker lives on as a library, Libwhisker, in the Nikto Web server scanner. Similarly, Schiffman's chapter on Libsf mentions the utility of creating a library offering the functionality of the popular Nmap scanning tool. (Unfortunately, I haven't seen progress on this. Nmap author Fyodor last mentioned 'Libnmap' in his 2003 Nmap features survey, and it's not apparent in the tool's latest version.)

I found the six library chapters to be helpful. Some of the code has stagnated since 2002 (Libnids, Libsf), while some has continued to evolve (Libpcap, Libdnet, OpenSSL). Schiffman provides good explanations of buffer overflow and format string attacks in ch 10, and I thought his state machine-based port scan detector (Descry) in ch 11 was innovative.

One of the strongest sections of BOSNST is ch 12, where the author provides a 25-page code walkthrough of his Firewalk tool. This chapter is the model for anyone seeking to explain tool internals. Schiffman offers flowcharts, context charts, and explanations of code snippets. He doesn't simply dump page after page of C code in front of the reader. (Most chapters of BOSNST do conclude with the full source code for sample tools, however.)

I have no real complaints with BOSNST. I found minor errors in two diagrams (p 220, 223 should show the SYN/ACK or RST reply coming from the target, not to the target). Schiffman's writing style is clear and engaging, which makes a difference when explaining functions in code.

Those who want to learn how to assemble their security expertise in the form code libraries should read BOSNST. Those who wish to use the libraries found in the book, or those with similar functionality, should also read BOSNST. I look forward to Schiffman's next book, where hopefully he will finally update his biography to say 'AFIWC' (for 'Air Force Information Warfare Center') instead of 'AFWIC' (aka the UN's 'AFrican Women In Crisis' program).

This book was the perfect reference manual for the busy network administrator that needs to quickly create powerful tools to enforce and monitor network security. From concept to implementation Schiffman will give you a thorough understanding of why and how to create open-sourced security tools that you can start using immediately. Using this book as a reference I was able to create a customized network sniffer and a few vulnerability analysis tools. Another great addition to my library that I highly recommend.

If you don't read the man pages then this book is for you. After reading the glowing reviews I went out to purchase this book. I am extermely dissappointed. The lion-share of the book is merely API description. There are some neat examples in every chapter, but they are available on the internet... The end chapters of the book are well written concise summaries of known techniques and concepts (possibly the only redeeming component of the book)
After using libnet I was expecting something great from the man who wrote such an awesome library. Experienced programmers should use the man pages. If you're new to information security topics then you might find this book useful.
A newbie would be well served by this book.

Every systems/ICT administrator must have a read at this book as I have not come across any similar book in its category. The authors attempt to be vendor neutral as much as possible and provide best practices from their professional expertise. I can definitely say that I have improved my efficiency in my role as ICT administrator after reading this book. Cheers.

I agree with some of the worse reviews: This book addresses all the touchy-feely stuff not found in other manuals.

That, however, is what it's for (It's plainly stated on the book! Read the friendly Meta-Manual!) and it is in fact a wonderfully lucidly written cornucopia of information in that field. It also is delightfully platform-independent, even if it is perceivable that the authors have a UNIX background (but which Sysad doesn't?).

It's a simple fact that Sysads get other things wrong more often than the tech stuff: Communicating changes, seeing it all from the user's POV, negotiating (yes, they deal with salary, too), saying "yes" so that it isn't understood as "yes to all"; saying "no" so that it isn't understood as "fsck you!".

That's why we're often hated as arrogant BOfHs. This manual endeavours to fix that, and it just might succeed.

The Practice of System and Network Administration shows you how to become a great SA.

This is no 'for dummies' book.

The Practice of System and Network Administration is a great guide.

The book market is flooded with books that will tell you all about the technical details of administering various software products and operating systems. Their scope is usually limited to whatever technical product is being written about and they become outdated as quickly as the technology becomes outdated. This book is very different. It gives guidelines in a very readable, coaching style, that can be applied to many different aspects of the System Administration trade.

I have been a System Administrator for a few years now, but this book clarifies many of the issues that I work with daily. It's like a having a mentor on my bookshelf that I can pull down and consult for advice. I especially like the whole section of seven chapters dealing with different aspects of management. These chapters should be mandatory reading for every SA -- and their bosses.

The book is written in a very readable style and has many useful and insightful real-world examples that show that the authors have been around and learned a lot on the way. The book is worth reading just for these examples. I read the book from cover to cover.

I first heard about this book when I attended a seminar Tom Limoncelli
taught at the 2003 LISA conference titled "Time Management for System Administrators: How to Keep from Going (More) Crazy". Many of the topics in the seminar are covered in detail in the book.

If you're a system administrator, you should read this book.

The first edition of PRACTICE OF SYSTEM AND NETWORK ADMINISTRATION covers modern IT methodology, and this updated second edition provides a revision of four major areas of knowledge relating to system administration, reviewing key elements of successful network systems, how to build and run reliable services, building data centers and addressing security issues, and more. It's a top pick for any library serious about catering to advanced web programmers, computer professionals, and students of network administration - as well as for practicing administrators.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I've read this book right after the "Just for fun" by Linus Torvalds, and the approach is somewhat different. "Just for fun" has the light weighted style of a talk show with all the inside details that make the delights of every geek fan. "rebel code" goes beyond this with a global overview of the Open Source/Free Software revolution. Everyone is there!
It also provides a deep view from the perspective of the "survival of the fittest" projects. Popping-up to the light from the mass of ideas just be absorbed on the global wave, or even disappear, all the relevant projects and participants of this movement are accurately contextualized.
This book is a must read for everyone that wants to get to know a bit more of this amazing new world that emerges from the freedom of choice in what concerns information.

A lot is discussed in this book, and I'd agree with Eric Raymond's comment that this is the best history of the open source movement. It starts off from Richard Stallman, GNU and "Free Software Foundation" and goes to the Mozilla foundation and the new trendy name of "Open Source Movement." The best parts are the email excerpts from various mailing lists, which take you back into history when things were still being defined.

Of course, most of the book deals with Linux only but isn't that the best case for hackers?

I ordered this book from Amazon because I had just ordered Linus Torvald's book Just for Fun and this book was also recommended. I am glad I did. Torvald's book was really fun to read and it really created an interest in the Open Source software phenomenon that I have heard about, but had mixed feelings about it for a few years. Rebel Code added to Torvald's account, a rather complete history to the whole phenomenon. The book covered elements that I have heard in the news, but wouldn't have come to mind, like the entry of IBM, the role of Novell, Sun, etc. As each important piece of software was discussed, some seemingly small like GIMP, DNS and Sendmail, the author paused to give a short bio of the author and how they each stumbled into this FOSS world, some quite accidently. There were so many fascinating stories, I am going to hold onto this book.

The book is mainly based on the information collected by the author from various people via e-mail, telephone or personal communication between September 1999 and September 2000, and the interview with Linus Torvalds at a critical juncture in his life, in December 1996, as well as other interviews with key players from the last three years.

The book begins with a story of Richard Stallman, who labored for years to create a Unix-like system, written from scratch that would be free. Hw worked alone at first; then he gradually received contributions from to others, including - thought neither of them knew it in 1991 - Linus, whose Linux program would provide the last major pieces still missing from Stallman's huge software jigsaw puzzle.

The book covers the GNU project from its formal beginning, when in January 1984 Stallman started working on Bison, which was a replacement for Yacc. Having limbered up with this relatively minor task, he moved on to one of the most important. One of the key elements of a Unix system is the C compiler. After an unsuccessful attempt, he returned to Emacs and released GNU Emacs in September 1984. In October 1985 he has founded Free Software Foundation and then proceeded with C compiler and the C library.

The book then describes the biography of Linus, his years at the university and his work on his operating system, his experience with Minix, quite popular at that time in academic area, and fight with Tanenbaum, the author of Minix. The book then brings out the history of the development of Linux in detail.

Besides Linux, this book covers Open Source movement in Netscape, the development of TEX, Perl, Cygnus, etc., and how big companies like IBM adopt Open Source software and contribute to its development.

I would also recommend "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond in addition to this book.

The book gives a complete history of open source development starting from the earlier days of RMS and Linus. The strong point of the book is that the depth of coverage on open source history is unmatchable. My most favourite chapters are the ones that describe the early development of Linux and the history of Perl.

Reading the book gives the impression that author's bias against the RMS-style free-software. Also the author gives enough hints of his dislike for Microsoft's style of proprietary software. And towards the end, as the author starts explaining linux' entry into the corporate place, the book tends to be a bit dragging.

Overall, a must read for any open source enthusiast.

Helpful for getting your head around the principles of Apache modules, but for modern API reference, see Apache's online docs.

While this book is a bit outdated and technology has greatly changed since this text was released in 1999, this is still a solid reference for anyone that works with Apache and still needs to support writing modules with Perl (not as much with C). At a hefty size of over 700+ pages, this text will certainly help you do the job and it's a great bargain for this specialty text.

Chapter Overview

01. Server-Side Programming with Apache
02. First Module
03. Apache Module Architecture and API
04. Content Handlers
05. Maintaining State
06. Authentication & Authorization
07. Other Request Phases
08. Customizing the Apache Configuration Process
09. Perl API Reference Guide
10. C API Reference, Part I
11. C API Reference, Part II

**** RECOMMENDED

I bought this book awhile ago USED here on Amazon (for $2.00!), and it was worth every penny!

Although this book is old, it has some useful reference material that can still be applied today.

It doesn't mention as much about C as it does PERL, but it does cover the basic fundamental principles of using either language to create your own apache modules, which was more of what I was interested in.

Not much there for C, although it's not too difficult to make use of the Perl topics and covert them to C, it's more geared towards Perl (much more). That's too bad. Still, it's a good book and is very useful for referencing as well as for people looking to learn more about this topic.

It's all in Perl. The book says "Apache Modules with Perl and C" but really, it's all in Perl. The only mentions I've seen in C are the very very beginning, and the end that restates the Apache documentation.

If you bought this book thinking it will have sample C code, you would be wrong.

If you like Perl, then this is the book for you, but if you prefer C, as I do, then you will have wasted your money.

Samba is great and this book covered the subject thoroughly. Very pleased.

This is not an introduction to Samba but a technical reference written by those who know it best - the Samba Team. If you already know something about Samba then this is the place you will find very detailed explanations of all the internal and external capabilities of Samba-3.0.11 and higher. While it is easy enough to find information on how to set Samba up as a file and print server, how to use its other features is harder information to come by. This book details setting up Samba as a domain controller, backup domain controller, or domain member, network browsing, access controls, record locking, securing Samba, interdomain trusts, printing support, user profiles, administration, monitoring, and tuning. A voluminous tome, most people will not be inclined to read through it but would more likely read the sections relevant to their current needs and the book is organized so that it is easy to use that way. A true technical reference it has everything you are likely to ever want to know about Samba-3 and how to set it up correctly as well as how to resolve common problems. This is a reference that I will be keeping close at hand and you will want to too if you use Samba-3. The Official Samba-3 Howto and Reference Guide, Second Edition is highly recommended.

I tried to get started with SAMBA, but could never get off the ground using material printed in many Linux books. After going through this book, I realized many key concepts that I was missing, such as windows domain accounts to Unix account mappings and such.

This book has an abundance of information in it. Some things that look exciting were some information about the PDC/BDC style integratrion and also Active Directory Kerberos integration. There's also a section on CUPS integration.

Overall I found this resource quite invaluable. Maybe there's online material that is better, but for printed text this is one of the best books out there...

Anxious to set up samba at home I headed down to the local bookstore and picked up this book at full price (perhaps the only samba 3 book there). I think I read about 1/4 of the book and have now decided it will be going back tomorrow. It's easy to read if you have some Windows and some Linux/UNIX experience, but every chapter is plagued with sentences an 8th grade student failing English could have pointed to problems! Sometimes it was difficult to determine what the meaning of some statements should be. In one chapter a discussion of non-encrypted passwords repeated advantages from the discussion of encrypted passwords, advantages that clearly do not exist!

It feels likes the HOWTOs from the Internet were simply copied, so why wasn't there time to edit?

This book reports the Samba 2 configuration examples and seems to ignore that Samba 3 "talks" directly with LDAP without the numerous "scripts" that are reported in the examples. This ia a Samba 2 daptation to the LDAP directory service and simply sucks!
If you want to make a donation to the Samba "father" John Terpstra, then buy the book but for real stuff, simply go in Internet, you will find exactly the same obsolete documentation, not a word more nor less.