Python for Unix and Linux System Administration

Efficient Problem Solving with Python

By Noah Gift, Jeremy Jones
August 2008
Pages: 456
ISBN 10: 0-596-51582-0 | ISBN 13: 9780596515829
Press Release
(4) (Average of 2 Customer Reviews)

Description

Python is an ideal language for solving problems, especially for Linux and Unix. With this pragmatic book, administrators can review various tasks that often occur in the management of these systems, and learn how Python can provide a more efficient way to handle them. Once you finish this book, you'll be able to develop your own set of command-line utilities with Python to tackle a wide range of problems.
Full Description

Python is an ideal language for solving problems, especially in Linux and Unix networks. With this pragmatic book, administrators can review various tasks that often occur in the management of these systems, and learn how Python can provide a more efficient and less painful way to handle them.

Each chapter in Python for Unix and Linux System Administration presents a particular administrative issue, such as concurrency or data backup, and presents Python solutions through hands-on examples. Once you finish this book, you'll be able to develop your own set of command-line utilities with Python to tackle a wide range of problems. Discover how this language can help you:

Read text files and extract information
Run tasks concurrently using the threading and forking options
Get information from one process to another using network facilities
Create clickable GUIs to handle large and complex utilities
Monitor large clusters of machines by interacting with SNMP programmatically
Master the IPython Interactive Python shell to replace or augment Bash, Korn, or Z-Shell
Integrate Cloud Computing into your infrastructure, and learn to write a Google App Engine Application
Solve unique data backup challenges with customized scripts
Interact with MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, Postgres, Django ORM, and SQLAlchemy

With this book, you'll learn how to package and deploy your Python applications and libraries, and write code that runs equally well on multiple Unix platforms. You'll also learn about several Python-related technologies that will make your life much easier.

Featured customer reviews

Good book with a few typos, March 12 2009

Rating:

Submitted by Eric Lake (etank) [Respond | View]

I recently got my hands on a copy of "Python for Unix and Linux System Administration". After reading it, I felt the time I've invested in reading it was well spent. The author introduced the reader to many different situations where python would help make their lives as system administrators easier, without confusing the reader with some complex forms or statements. My feeling is that this book is aimed at people who want to use Python to solve their problems quickly and efficiently, but only have a limited experience with the language - and the books fits that purpose well with its rather superficial approach that the reader can later extend later on with various available resources. It would only be fair that I too mention some of the shortcomings that I noticed while reading this book.

Pros:

* The author introduces the reader to ways that Python can be used.
* Most of the time there will be more than one way to accomplish a task. The author at times presents a scenario and showed the reader how to do the same task with different modules. This places the choice of which to use back where it belongs, with the reader.
* The book has a website (most do these days) where the code examples can be downloaded. http://py4sa.appspot.com/

Cons:

* More time was spent on iPython than was really needed.
* The case of a word is important in Python. For instance "import Sys" and "import sys" are two completely different things. There were quite a few occasions where a module name was used as the first word in the sentence and because of that it was capitalized.
* There was once instance that I saw where a script example had no indentation at all. Trying to run it would have resulted in complete failure.
* It would have been nice if the script examples were named instead of leaving it to the reader to figure it out based on the imports used in another example.

When all is said and done I think I would recommend the book to others if I knew that they had at least some background with Python. And I would highly recommend that they check the addendum and errata pages.

Great Book for SysAdmins, November 03 2008

Rating:

Submitted by Alfredo Deza [Respond | View]

When I got this book, I was just starting to use Python as a solution to everyday problems as a Sys Admin.

Although it has some advanced sections, I was able to put in place a lot of the examples right away.

This is probably one of the best books I have used to solve system administration issues regarding a programming language (After the Bash Cookbook).

Log files, automated configuration updates, parsing for information and even a new shell (ipython), are some of the cool stuff these guys deliver.

I have even recommended the book to non system administrators as it doesn't assume you know the language inside out.

Read all reviews

Media reviews
"If you are an administrator, project organizeer or data monkey (a term for system admins who push files in a digital video shop) you should check out this book. "
-- Lee McKusick, Peninsula Linux Users' Group

"If you are a Python advocate who is also responsible on occasion with managing your home or company computers, the book provides enough ideas and enthusiasm to jumpstart that currently manual system administrator task that begs to be automated."
-- Mike Riley, Dr. Dobb's CodeTalk

"This fabulous book will help you to read text files and extract information, run tasks using threading and forking options, get clickable GUI utilities, monitor large clusters of machines by interacting with SNMP programmatically, master the IPython shell...and much more."
-- Nadia Russ, Wonderpedia

Read all reviews

See larger cover

Recent Forum Posts

Join the discussion