BSD UNIX Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD 1st Edition

excellent book, lots of great commands to get you used to the command line. Only downfall is Amazon is not packaging their books well anymore, I ordered $100 worth of books that were all thrown in a box and arrived all banged up! This is the 2nd order in a row, I will think twice about ordering again as I dont care for my books being all banged up! They used to use a cellofane wrapper to hold them all together but guess it was a cost cutting measure, sad to see damaged books.. I'd rather pay full price and get a good one..

This book is a excellent resource for anyone that is working with UNIX. The book is arranged to teach you the basics first, and then move on the more advanced commands. This is what makes this book great for any new BSD user, as well as the experienced ones. I have been working with FreeBSD for several years, and I was amazed at how much I have learned from this book.

The meat of this book, like it's Linux counterparts in the series (I read Ubuntu Linux Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for Ubuntu and Debian Power Users), lies in the useful shell commands that even seasoned administrators may have overlooked or useful combinations that never occurred to them. Personally I've used Linux since 1999 and have three or four years of professional administration on Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris. To my surprise I still found one or two new tricks in the Ubuntu book and quite a few more in the BSD book.A junior administrator or a intermediate hobbyist will find countless pointers, commands, and insight that takes years of reading man pages, web searching, and chatting with other geeks to figure out. I know Francois Caen, one of the writers in this series, and his goal was to bring together all these "tools" he uses every day to accelerate your learning curve. I think he and Negus met that goal.While I thought this book was good, it was missing a few things I expected to see. It's clearly focused on Linux users who want to put their toe in the BSD pool. That's pretty good for me, primarily a Linux user, but users not coming from a Linux background may be lead slightly astray. Special attention is paid to setting up a FreeBSD system that can play nicely with Linux systems (reading ext2/3 file systems, for example). I feel that the Linux compatibility received a bit too much coverage, but given the popularity of Linux, many will appreciate it.The book is applicable to all BSD based systems, and even Linux and commercial Unix variants to a lesser extent, but it focuses on the popular FreeBSD variant. Personally I'm exploring OpenBSD for use as routers/firewalls, and I'd say about 80% of the BSD content in this book is applicable to OpenBSD (in my naive viewpoint). I really wished they would have covered the OpenBSD packet filter (PF) more, but with the focus on FreeBSD, IPF is covered instead. I was quite surprised at the easy to use syntax of IPF compared to IPChains in Linux.As seems to be the trend with recent technical books, there were a couple typos in some of the examples, but a careful reader can catch the gist of what was meant.All in all BSD Unix Toolbox is a great book for an intermediate Linux or Unix user interested in exploring the FreeBSD command line. I all but guarantee you will find a few new commands to add to your own toolbox.

This book contains some good stuff. My only wish is that I had gotten the physical book and not the eBook version

This book makes a nice addition to my FreeBSD collection. It contains a comprehensive listing of useful commands collected in a single source. The book is fairly compact so it doesn't take up much room on your desk. The softcover makes it easy to quickly flip through the sections.For the price, this book was well worth it!

Easy to use, the stuff works, the book is worth every cent.

Item arrived quickly, exactly as advertised, works great - Thanks !

EDIT: Added another error on page 259. Author specifies:firewall_type="/etc/ipf.rules"...which is flat out wrong. Doing that on a remote system will result in a broken firewall and probably losing access to the remote system! Another example of the lousy editing in this book.It should read:firewall_type="closed" (or open, workstation, unknown, etc.)Original Review:This is one of several books by the author that span multiple operating systems. Errors were found sprinkled throughout the text. Most of the errors involved commands from other operating systems that had been mistakenly added to this book. For example, "lspci", a command found in most Linux distributions is listed in this book as a FreeBSD command.It appears the authors did a lot of cutting and pasting between their different "toolbox" books -- FreeBSD, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc. There are a lot of commands in this book. Whether they are actually useful is questionable.