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As Bill Lubanovic and I were putting the final touches on this book, I overheard a
conversation between two coworkers in our Cisco lab discussing Linux. The senior
networking guru of the two made an interesting remark. He said that despite all his
knowledge, he felt incomplete as a professional because he had never learned Linux.
A moment later he and the other gentleman turned to me and looked me square in
the eyes. I smiled and went on working.
That evening, our director of Information Technology made an offhand remark to
me during a conference that struck me as unusual. He said that he wanted to learn
Apache, and when I asked him why he replied, “I just want to learn it,” and left it at
that.
Later in the conference, our director requested feedback from the group on a solu-
tion for patch management, explaining and using the example of rsync. He said he
wanted something similar, while launching into a detailed technical discussion of
incremental and cumulative patch management. I have a good working knowledge of
rsync, but hadn’t heard such a detailed academic explanation of any open source tool
in any forum.
In both of those cases and many others, I wished I had this book ready to hand over
to highly trained and skilled people who wanted to learn Linux administration. Per-
haps you have had similar experiences and wished you had a book like this one at
hand. I venture to guess that conversations like the ones I’ve just described occur
many times in many places daily.
When Andy Oram and I began discussing a Linux system administration book, we
had a slightly different idea of what we wanted to accomplish. Andy talked about a
book in which each chapter took users through the steps of building and deploying
application servers without co-mingling detailed discussions. He suggested that the
discussion reside in one place in each chapter and the technical steps in another.