Building a Foundation of Knowledge

Since CurlyFries was tied up yesterday, he's unable to continue his Tracker Demystified series today. Instead, I bring you some learning advice and an ambitious reading list from a true bookworm, or book-collector — whichever you prefer. As an admin, the most important thing you can have is a friend that knows what they're talking about when it comes to Linux. Second best is a book to tell you how to do it and give you more detail. Since I'm not a Linux guru by trade, having plenty of people and books around got me out of quite a few tight spots. I wouldn't have normally been able to wiggle out them on my own just Googling. Sometimes even the smallest pieces of advice are worthwhile.

For example, we were trying to do some optimization on the server because TorrentFries' forums were slowing down. When I asked a friend what he knew about optimization, he asked me "How does htop look?" Quite frankly, I had never heard of it, but it's proven to be one of the most useful tools, not to mention the most used. (htop is a more advanced visual extension to top. You'll never use top again.)

Anyways, I've latched onto over half a dozen such people to draw from their Linux expertise now and again, and also so I don't have to go back to the same person time and time again. Networking is more than just TCP/IP. ;)

I'll start you off with my recommendations from the books I've read. I'm not going to claim that they're the best, just that they've provided me with some good background.

Unix Administration

How Linux Works
UNIX, Third Ed.
The Book of Postfix (email - just a casual read)

Development

PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide
PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy
SQL Power!: The Comprehensive Guide

Web Design

Web Designer's Reference
Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook
CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
Pro CSS Techniques

I've read quite a few others, but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave them off. Here are a couple other books that I might also suggest reading even though I haven't read them yet, or only have read excerpts out of.

Apache Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for Apache Administrators
High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More
Apache: The Definitive Guide
Running Linux
Hardening Linux

There you have it. That's well over a year's worth of reading by my standard, but it's a solid foundation of knowledge. Hopefully tomorrow will bear more tracker information.