BSD Hacks

Dru knows her stuff and clearly conveys the material.

Dru Lavigne is the Brian Kernighan of the BSD world. All things she has written are eminently readable, and this small book is no exception. Most of the tips are for FreeBSD and assume you're using csh/tcsh (hopefully tcsh!!), but most of the tips can be applied to other BSDs with relative ease. The BSDs have diverged from each other considerably, but the base system of each has most of the tools needed to do the things listed in this book. Some are fairly obvious, some are not, but all are written in Dru Lavigne's breezy and fun style which makes reading through this book such a joy. Highly recommended, especially if you're a Linux person thinking about dipping your toes into the BSD world (come on over, we have cake on the dark side!) and are slightly confounded at the minor but significant differences in the feel of the BSDs versus X or Y or Z Linux.

Delving into BSD, I could not find the amount of print material I was hoping for... but instead found online (internet and CDROM) materiel of man pages, command listings, etc... I don't mind the "RTFM" response, but I cannot stand when folks push man (1) pages as the center of teaching BSD. I hate to push against the un*x mentality, but I work better with printed books... and Dru's book of BSD Hacks helped fill a big gap of knowledge I had.I'm amending this review just based on time; some of the hacks within don't work anymore (CVSup, anyone?) based on deprecated programs/commands. Not the fault of the writer... partially the fault of the publisher, since there probably won't be an update.I'd seen it in a local book store, but didn't want to pay full price. Amazon's listing of a used copy was snatched up by me very quickly, and has a prized place in my BSD network laboratory...Until (if ever) an O'reilly "BSD in a Nutshell" book comes out, this one will fill in the gaps of "hidden" and "prized" knowledge. Get a copy soon...

I have been a fan of Dru's articles on O'Reilly's ONLamp website for some time, so purchasing this book was a no-brainer for me. After just 30 minutes of thumbing through this book, my impression was that it would be a 'steal' at twice the price. After spending an entire evening reading and applying some of her 'hacks' this book has earned a spot of honor on my shelf right next to "Absolute BSD" by Michael W. Lucas.The writing is straight-forward with a minumum of 'fluff', so an intermediate to experienced sysadmin can apply the tips and tricks offered in a very short period of time. If you want to save yourself hours/days/weeks of trolling 'PowerUser' forums, and archived mailing lists I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

excellent book, lots of great commands to get you used to the command line. Only downfall is Amazon is not packaging their books well anymore, I ordered $100 worth of books that were all thrown in a box and arrived all banged up! This is the 2nd order in a row, I will think twice about ordering again as I dont care for my books being all banged up! They used to use a cellofane wrapper to hold them all together but guess it was a cost cutting measure, sad to see damaged books that could be prevented with a little care!

Why aren't there more books like this? I wish the authors who created these types of books would start a kickstarter project. I have no doubt they would meet their quota.

If you are new to FreeBSD this isn't the first book to get but it is definately the second. Dru Lavigne is one of the clearist computer book writers around. I first discovered her reading her article on the O'Reilly Network and learned so much, This book continues her tips and tricks and sage advise. This is a must have if you're into FreeBSD.

I just thought this book is not really that good. Most were not even hacks, but just basic usage. The only hacks book I really liked was by Rob - Linux Server Hacks. I would really recommend that one, even if you use bsd as it has true hacks with tar/ssh/etc. Try the Absolute OpenBSD book too. That is quite good and has a lot of info.