Recommendations for BSD Unix Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for FreeBSD & BSD Books

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 02:10:45PM -0700, loony wrote:
> 
> Overall, Absolute FreeBSD boosted my confidence/competence but as my
> only  printed  Unix/Linux/BSD  resource although it is not the "be one
> and end all"  resource to FreeBSD as I was hoping for, particularly
> when it comes to slightly more advanced topics as building a
> production LAMP server.  I have the budget for another book. 

Configuring a ?AMP server is largely not really OS specific (apart from
things like firewalling). The AMP part should work on all UNIX-like
systems. Of course FreeBSD has ports, which makes installation of the
software easier.

Some searching on the internet is certain to give you lots of tutorials.

> This recommendation would be for a FreeBSD novice user.  If they
> didn't know how to script and had a choice between BSD UNIX Toolbox
> and a book about how to script, what would they be better off getting?

Depends on the persons other exerience. I switched to FreeBSD after
having used Slackware Linux for several years. With the Handbook and the
manual pages, I fealt at home straight away.

For novices, I would teach them system administration first, and
scripting later.

> On that note, does anyone have recommendations for a freebsd
> orientated beginners guide to scripting and using scripts to manage a
> freebsd box and common systems/services/daemons?

There is a lot of usefull documentation included with FreeBSD, starting
with the Handbook and FAQ. Look in /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books

Daemons belonging to the base system or available via ports come with a
control script in (/usr/local)/etc/rc.d. There is no need to write your
own, unless you want to contribute a new port, which is not really a job
for a novice. However, one can learn a lot by studying the already available
scripts and the infrastructure that supports them. 

I've also found the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
[http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/] usefull, although one has to be carefull
of bash-specific features not supported by FreeBSD's /bin/sh.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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