Ruby has set the world on fire, proving itself a serious challenger to Perl and Python in all spheres. In particular, more and more people are discovering that Rubys flexibility, superb feature set, and gentle learning curve make it a natural choice for system administration tasks, from the humblest server to the largest enterprise deployment.
Within the pages of Practical Ruby for System Administration, youll learn the Ruby way to construct files, tap into clouds of data, build domain-specific languages, perform network traffic analysis, and more.
Based on author André Ben Hamous own experiences working as a system administrator, this book will help you pick up practical tips on Ruby coding style, learn how to analyze and improve script performance, and make use of no-nonsense advice on scripting workflow, including testing and documentation.
Above all, youll come to appreciate the sheer power of Ruby and the hundreds of benefits it offers for system administration.
This book places equal emphasis on fundamental Ruby concepts as well as practical how-tos.
It uses examples from other languages to ease the transition to Ruby.
The book is concise, entertaining, and informativeunlike many books aimed at system administrators, which can be overly long and stodgy.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - More than just sysadmin
The title just doesn't do this book justice. Yes, there's some sysadmin bent, but most of the discussion is much more broadly applicable -- it isn't just sysadmins who care about writing clean code, storing data in the cloud, LDAP, safe file handling, dsls, SOAP, graphing, etc etc etc.
Plus Hamou is really funny in his own way. This book reminds of K&R or the Perl Camel book -- it is written in a conversational tone, with valuable gems (no pun intended) mentioned in passing.
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Rating: - Expected more...
This isn't a bad book! There is coverage of LDAP, database processing with ActiveRecord, XML parsing and a number of tools that sys admins and developers who administer their own dev environment routinely use. The section on network monitoring as well as the Chapter on single liners for Ruby Sys Admins are worth the cover price for the book. However, I was a bit disappointed with the lack of coverage in some areas where the author introduced a basic concept at a level too basic for experienced users ... Read More
Rating: - Great suppliment for system admins
I thought this book would be great for me since I am a Unix administrator still relatively new to Ruby. I was right. This book covers a wide variety of topics, from ActiveRecord, to parsing XML and several other normal administration tasks. (network programming, ssh, monitoring) The depth of the coverage is more than adequate in most places. I learned quite a bit about using Ruby to automate some tasks, and of equal importance, I learned about the infrastructure behind ruby. He reviews performance, ... Read More
Rating: - Concise and helpful
If you've encountered Ruby primarily through Rails and know it chiefly as an elegant tool for writing web applications it's easy to miss its longer history as a tool for systems administration. Before Rails made Ruby the language-du-jour sysadmins bore much of the responsibility for keeping it alive, with the result that it has a suite of libraries helpful for server monitoring and a range of other administrative tasks.
Author André Ben Hamou is clear that his book is not an exhaustive guide ... Read More
- More than just sysadmin
- Expected more...
