Must Haves

You'll likely be buying plenty of other useful Unix books over the course of your career (I know I have!), but these should be the foundation. If I was heading to Antarctica to be a sysadmin, and could only take along a handful of books, I would take these four.

Unix in a Nutshell, 4th ed.
by Arnold Robbins
O'Reilly & Associates, 2005

Unix System Administration Handbook, 3rd ed.
by Evi Nemeth, et al.
Prentice-Hall PTR, 2001

Essential System Administration, 3rd ed.
by Aeleen Frisch
O'Reilly & Associates, 2002

Portable Shell Programming
by Bruce Blinn
Prentice-Hall PTR, 1996

About Solaris Books

Why aren't any Solaris books listed above? Although Solaris-specific sysadmin training is essential, I can't recommend any Solaris-specific sysadmin books. I bought them all when I was starting out, but have never gotten much use out of them. My book shelf contains dog-eared and annotated copies of all the books listed above; my Solaris books (Solaris 2.x for Managers and Administrators, Solaris System Administrator's Guide, Solaris Advanced System Administrator's Guide, etc.) are all gathering dust.

docs.sun.com

The essential tool for answering questions about Solaris system administration is Sun's documentation available on docs.sun.com. This online set of manuals is the mother lode when it comes to answering any Solaris operating system (or Sun hardware) questions.

An Answerbook CD-ROM is also included in the Solaris media kit. It can be loaded onto a local server if desired (or if you don't have access to the internet and docs.sun.com).