dtrace

Pro OpenSolaris
$44.99
Pro OpenSolaris is an excellent primer to Sun's new operating system - OpenSolaris! The book provides a great introduction to OpenSolaris for anyone not accustomed to a UNIX environment and a great transition guide for anyone looking to transition from older UNIX or Linux platforms. Administrators familiar with earlier Solaris versions will find Pro OpenSolaris a benefit in transitioning to the latest technologies such as the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) and the various ways to employ virtualization. The fluid discussions and excellent screenshots allow the user to quickly learn the ins and outs of the system. This book has shown how easy it is to get an OpenSolaris system up and running and all the fun that can be had for both legacy Solaris users and Linux users alike!

Solaris(TM) Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris
$59.99
I will make this as short as I can, unlike the one for the companion book, Solaris Internals. I have been troubleshooting Sun Solaris for 15 years, in one version or another. Crash dump analysis was the main way to get data from within the kernel and only if the system blew a gasket. There have been different methods through the years,crash, kdb, and mdb are the main ones, but now with Solaris 10 you can add a powerful tool to your knowledge tool box, DTrace. This is built in to the system code so its not a seperate program that you run, it lives in Solaris and you enable the probes you want to see. Interpreting the data is not easy if you dont know what you are looking at, so the Companion book tells you what the internal workings are so you can know what you are looking at. This book tells you how to find the most used issues or problems. It covers these things in more detail than you can find unless you work in and engineering lab and program apps for Solaris. Solaris 10 has many things in it that can throw an admin, Zones for instance, can throw you if you are having some type of performance issue, but what can you do to get the data from the kernel to watch the internal processes deep under the hood? DTrace should be the first thing out of your mouth. This is a top notch book and I understand other people's issues or questions with it, however, assume you have not touched Solaris 10 in production and your company is doing a technology refresh and migration to new Sun Hardware and Solaris 10. How are you going to help your company troubleshoot issues in this new envrionment? You will use DTrace and any other tools you can. I use DTrace almost every day. I did today.

So if you want to know how Dtrace and mdb and other utility commands are used, buy this book and sit down on a Solaris 10 box and start typing. If you want to see other people's take on it, go to one of the Author's web sites. Brendan Gregg. You can look him up on the web. This is a fine fine add on book and I have two copies of it too. One at home and one in my book bag. It is one of my top 10 carried books when I travel.

Kudo's to Brendan, Rich, and Jim.

Thanks and keep up the good work.


Sincerely

Bill Branson

OpenSolaris Bible (Bible (Wiley))
$49.99
I totally agree with Dan, this is a great book that can be applied not only to Open Solaris but Solaris 10 as well. I have been working with Solaris systems as a System administrator for over 10 years and this is one of the best books I have read. The information is very much in depth yet very easy to read, I have a hard time sticking to one chapter because I want to jump around to the others as well. Everthing you need to know about Solaris 10 is pretty much right here. From file system management to ZFS, this book has it all. Highly recommended.

Solaris Internals(TM): Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture (2nd Edition)
$84.99
First, let me say that I have two copies of the first edition, one that stays in my home library and one that is falling apart literally. So I have used the internals book (s)many times in my career. I am a man of many hats, systems administration, system architect, system engineer, system analyst, and too many more to say in this forum. In my career I have had many reasons to use these fine products. Mainly because when I am working a job or consutling for whatever reason, I need to know that I have the resources to get the job done.

Next, my first real performance tuning challenge was a Sun Enterprise E10K, with multiple domains, running SAP. It was a huge deployment and there were already problems in the developmental deployment phase. The machine was running Solaris 8 and there was some great discussion between the clients and the vendor about the possible solutions. The vendor had people on the phone that were discussing the performance issue and I overheard them say a name or two, Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro. I asked them who they were and they looked at me kind of funny, but one of them said he is one of our top performance people. They had a book lying open on the conference table and it was the first edition of this book. I looked at a few pages of it and bought one that night. I got to be part of a great moment in my career. I used that book and its secrets for many other problems in the following years. Then Solaris 10 comes along and is an whole different animal for an Operating System. DTrace is a great utility built into the system for finding out all sorts of neat things. Well, the story I heard was that the second edition of this book was too big to fit into one book and there was a real need to expand it out into a second edition that specialized in Dtrace and other Performance Tuning Tools. That is a second book that I will talk about on its review page. This book, the internals book, second edition, is so invaluable to me that I have two copies of it as well. One that goes with me everywhere and one that is home in my reference library. I have been working with Solaris and Sun OS about Sun OS 4.1.4 and Solaris 2.4. Solaris 10 is so much different and better than any I have used before it. Solving performance issues is different too. Understanding how Solaris 10 works on a computer is very crucial to solving performance issues. You must have the tools available to do that with or the outcome could be very bad.

Finally, I rate this book as High as I can since I have used and still use both editions weekly to refer to something in Solaris that pertains to an issue I am having or someone in one of the environments I support is having. Kudos to Rich and Jim. I hope that all follow on books will keep going in the same direction, that of giving one the knowledge about Solaris internals to help solve those performance issue.

Sincerely

Bill Branson