Recommended Reading

One of my bookshelves in 2006, before I packed
many of these away and moved to the US

I've frequently been asked for textbook recommendations, especially as a technical trainer, which I've been sharing on this page. I'll keep this up to date as I finish reading more books that I'd recommend.

Unix Performance

• DTrace - Brendan Gregg, Jim Mauro (Prentice Hall, 2011)
• Solaris Performance and Tools - Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro, Brendan Gregg (Prentice Hall, 2006)
• Sun Performance and Tuning 2nd Ed. - Adrian Cockcroft, Richard Pettit (Prentice Hall, 1998)
• Configuration and Capacity Planning for Solaris Servers - Brian L. Wong (Prentice Hall, 1997)

Database Performance

• Configuring & Tuning Databases on the Solaris Platform - Allan N. Packer (Prentice Hall, 2001)
• Optimizing Oracle Performance - Cary Millsap, Jeff Holt (O'Reilly, 2003)
• High Performance MySQL - Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, ... (O'Reilly, 2008)

Unix Internals

• Solaris Internals 2nd Ed. - Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro (Prentice Hall, 2006)
• Solaris Internals 1st Ed. - Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro (Prentice Hall, 2000)
• Mac OS X Internals - Amit Singh (Addison-Wesley, 2006)
• Unix Internals - Uresh Vahalia (Prentice Hall, 1995)
• The Magic Garden Explained - Berny Goodheart, James Cox (Prentice Hall, 1995)
• The Design of the Unix Operating System - Maurice J. Bach (Prentice Hall, 1986)
• Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition - John Lions (Annabooks, 1977)

Unix Administration

• Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, ... (Prentice Hall, 2010)
• OpenSolaris Bible - Nicholas A. Solter, Jerry Jelinek, David Miner (Wiley, 2009)
• Unix Hints & Hacks - Kirk Waingrow (Que, 1999)
• Think Unix - Jon Lasser (Que, 2000)
• Unix in a Nutshell - Arnold Robbins (O'Reilly, 2005)
• Anything by O'Reilly

Computer Security

• Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson (Fiction, Avon, 2002)
• The Cuckoo's Egg - Cliff Stoll (Gallery, 2005)
• Secrets and Lies - Bruce Schneier (Wiley, 2004)
• The Art of Deception - Kevin Mitnick (Wiley, 2003)
• Hacking Exposed - McClure, Scambray, Kurtz (McGraw-Hill Osborne, 2009)
• Tangled Web - Richard Power (Que, 2000)
• Applied Cryptography - Bruce Schneier (Wiley, 1996)
• The Tao of Network Security Monitoring - Richard Bejtlich (Addison-Wesley, 2004)

Programming

• Solaris Systems Programming - Rich Teer (Prentice Hall, 2004)
• Solaris Application Programming - Darryl Gove (Prentice Hall, 2008)
• The Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks (Addison-Wesley, 1995/1975)
• The Unix Programming Environment - Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike (Prentice Hall, 1984)
• The Art of Unix Programming - Eric S. Raymond (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
• Anything by O'Reilly

C

• The C Programming Language 2nd Ed. - Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie (Prentice Hall, 1988)
• Expert C Programming - Peter van der Linden (Prentice Hall, 1994)

Perl

• Anything by O'Reilly

Shell

• The AWK Programming Language - Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, Peter J. Weinberger (Addison Wesley, 1988)

IT History

• In the Beginning was the Command Line - Neal Stephenson (William Morrow, 1999)
• Where Wizards Stay Up Late - Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
• Dealers of Lightning - Michael A. Hiltzik (Harper, 2000)
• Accidental Empires - Robert X. Cringely (Harper, 1996)
• Just For Fun - Linus Torvalds (Harper, 2002)
• Life With Unix - Don Libes, Sandy Ressler (Prentice Hall, 1989)
• Nerds 2.0.1 A Brief History of the Internet - Stephen Segaller (TV Books, 1999)

Misc Favourites

• Skunk Works - Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos (Black Bay Books, 1996)
• The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard (Penguin, 2006/1922)

Management

• The Dilbert Principle - Scott Adams (Harper, 1997)

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