Essential Windows NT System Administration

This is quite honestly the best NT administration book I own. It is full of great info (that is logically laid out and easy to find) and there is no fluff. What is more is the book is well written. I am really hoping for the author to write another edition on 2000 and .Net.

In another review, I wrote spoke of how numerous publishers of computer books are under the delusion that their books must be big and heavy to be of value. An editor at a major publishing company of computer books (who obviously requested anonymity) told me that to dominate the shelf space, many publishers produce large, fat computer books. I wrote how such books often have an extremely low knowledge-to-page ratio. The low knowledge-to-page ratio is used to detail how much actual learning is gleaned per page. When books are crammed with useless graphs, screen shots and illustrations, the knowledge-to-page ratio declines.Luckily, O'Reilly & Associates ... do not follow such a creed. The reason O'Reilly books due not suffer from a low knowledge-to-page ratio is that they reason that their readers are smart, well-informed & experienced. Given such an assumption, O'Reilly does not need to pad their books with useless and redundant information. O'Reilly sees themselves as solutions providers to their readers, attempting to produce solid, decisive books. That is their intent, and they have succeeded marvelously.Essential Windows NT System Administration is written not just to be a guide to Window NT, but rather to assist an NT administrator to work smarter and more productively. Frisch writes that her goal with this book is to assist system administrators in managing Windows NT systems as productively as possible, while making the task as pleasant and satisfying as can be. Giving the sometimes difficult nature of Windows NT, this is a lofty goal. The book covers the workstation and server versions of Windows NT 4 on both Intel and Alpha processor-based systems. The books covers the following key areas of NT system administration:· How Windows NT systems boot and how to shut them down · User account administration, including tips for managing large numbers of accounts · Creating file systems, including striped and fault-tolerant file systems, and securing their contents from unauthorized access · Sharing file systems via the network, using Windows NT's native share facility and other facilities such as Samba and NFS · General and advanced network configuration, including DHCP, DNS, WINS, routing, and RAS · Managing printers, including local printers, network printers, and printer pools · Managing processes, including the Windows NT schedule service, as well as performance optimization and capacity planning · Securing Windows NT systems, including implementing security policies and system auditing · Automating system administration tasks with scriptsThe book opens with a brief overview of the responsibilities a system administrator and the NT tools available to help them do the job. Like most books, the first chapter is about the operating system architecture & design, administrative tools and wizards, NT trivia and legends, registry and the NT file system. Chapter 3 provides a good synopsis of user account management, whic

I have only been in NT Adminstration for 2 years. Ms. Frisch manages to make 15 years of experience understandable even to a novice like me. I feel like I've gained 5 years of experience since reading her book. My senior administrator has noticed the difference.

This is just the level I wanted to understand how to run NT and how to get around the difficulties. I needed to add a new disk, but it was the C: drive, so I wanted to recover all my existing data. This book is short and precise giving me just the key points and references to delve further. Much better than the other huge book "NT Unleashed" which is patronising.

This is a great book, even for experienced NT administrators. The organization and clear writing make it easy to find and understand the most important aspects of NT administration. The comparisons to Unix were great.