Recommended Solaris (and related topics) Books

After my book recommendation i was asked for some other recommendations about Solaris. Hmm … i will just include the books here, i’ve read on my own, there may be other good books. When you know such a book just drop me a note and an explanation why you think this book should be included into the list (“Want to sell more of my book” isn’t a valid reason ;) ):

Essentials - Beginners level

OpenSolaris Bible (Bible (Wiley))

by Nicholas A. Solter, Jerry Jelinek, David Miner
Good book to learn OpenSolaris. It elaborates on a lot of features of OpenSolaris and gives a good overview about the whole thing called OpenSolaris

Solaris 10 Security Essentials (Solaris System Administration)

Nice introduction into several security features of Solaris. I recommend it when you want to have a good overview about all the security features included in Solaris.

Solaris 10 ZFS Essentials (Solaris System Administration)

by Scott Watanabe
You will find all the infos of this book somewhere in the internet or in other books, but this book is a nice condensed summary of this topic on dead trees.

Essentials - Intermediate level

Solaris Internals: Solaris 10 and Open Solaris Kernel Architecture

by Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro
There is no better way short of reading the source code to learn about the internal mechanisms like dispatching, filesystems, schedulers etc … when it’s not here, you have to look into the source or in some obscure blogs …

Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris

by Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro, Brendan Gregg
It’s essential when you learn DTrace and want to know how to work with the Modular Debugger in Solaris.

Oracle Solaris 10 System Virtualization Essentials (Oracle Solaris System Administration)

by Jeff Victor, Jeff Savit , and Gary Combs
Good book about virtualization in conjunction with Solaris 10

DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD

Jim Mauro, Brendan Gregg, Chad Mynhier, Tariq Magdon-Ismail
The book about Dtrace. From my point of view a must have when you want to work with DTrace.

Essentials - Advanced level

Solaris Systems Programming (Paperback)

by Rich Teer
When “Solaris Internals” goes deep into the mechanisms, this book goes even a step deeper. When you really want to know how something works in Solaris and how you use as a programmer, this is the right book. However i’ve put it into the advanced level for a reason. It isn’t an easy read due to the topic of the book.

Other Tips

SunCluster. Hochverfügbarkeit unter Sun Solaris und OpenSolaris. The Fullmoon Framework

by Rolf Dietze
I’m somewhat divided about that book. I think from the technical side it’s really good, it gives a good insight into Sun Cluster and you can learn a lot out of it. But the presentation … well … could be better. Even i was able to detect a lot of typos … due to my extremely fast reading style i overlook typos normally, but here my reading flow stopped over at relatively frequent bugs. However i would recommend it, when you have no problems with typos in a book because of the content. And for readers in Germany it has a big advantage: It’s in german language. That’s really an advantage, as there are many people since the reunion who are still not that fluent in English as they would be in russian language. (Disclaimer: I got this book as a reviewer’s copy)

OpenSolaris für Anwender, Administratoren und Rechenzentren: Von den ersten Schritten bis zum produktiven Betrieb auf Sparc, PC und PowerPC basierten Plattformen

by Rolf Dietze, Tatjana Heuser, Jörg Schilling
Suffers the same typo problem and nowadays i recommend the OpenSolaris Bible. At the date of it’s publication it was one of the few really good book about OpenSolaris. However this changed. But this book has an advantage in Germany … it’s in german language. (Disclaimer: I got this book as a reviewer’s copy)