James M. Kretchmar's book, Open Source Network Administration is written in a concise and consistent manner. It delves into several open source management tools, some basic scripting pointers and an overview of some very commonly used network diagnostic tools (ping, traceroute, netstat and tcpdump).

The management tools are given a chapter a piece. The central tools he covers are SNMP, MRTG, Neo, Netflow and Oak. For each tool he addresses downloading, compiling, installing and using. The way he walks through each tool would be very helpful for the beginner Linux/Unix user. Conversely, it can get a little long-winded for someone who wishes to get to the meat of each tool. Though do not despair, he does end up getting to some pretty thorough examples of usage. As a whole these chapters provide a good overview of how to get the tools up and running, but not many ahh-haa's for someone who wants a little more.

The scripting chapters have the same aura as the management tools, good overviews that don't go into considerable depth. Perl and shell scripting are covered in two chapters. Topics include loops, conditionals, variables, etc. I won't rehash what I said above, but Perl and shell scripting are given 10 pages a piece...

The diagnostic tools section was, I thought, unnecessary. If you are unfamiliar with ping, traceroute, netstat and tcpdump then you probably are not going to be reading about SNMP MIB's or MRTG's capabilities of graphing traffic patterns.

I would advise someone to get this book if he was beginning networking and wanted a good overview of some great tools to help your job or hobby. For the seasoned professional it wouldn't be a complete loss as there are some some good pointers on usage, but nothing that you couldn't teach yourself by reading man pages and mucking around with the syntax.

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