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Book Review: Pro Linux System Administration
by Sander Marechal“By the end of this book, You’ll be well on your way to becoming a Linux expert” is quite a bold claim for a book that is aimed at people who only have some familiarity with Windows and networking. “Pro Linux System Administration” by James Turnbull, Peter Lieverdink and Dennis Matotek aims to do precisely that and surprisingly, it largely succeeds. In its 1080 pages it explains how you can set up and configure multiple Linux servers to operate a small business network. Starting with basic Linux management and working up the stack through networking, e-mail and webservers you will end up with a pretty complete network that includes document management, groupware and disaster recovery.
The only downside of the book is that it becomes terser as it goes along. Part 1 and half of part 2 are quite thorough. They explain what you are doing, why you are doing it, differences between distributions and possible gotchas. But as the book moves up the application stack these explanations become shorter and in some cases amount to little more than an installation walk-through. I think it would have been better to focus on fewer alternative applications and dive deeper into those.
This article was originally posted at LXer Linux News.
Book Review: Practical CakePHP Projects
by Sander MarechalCakePHP has rapidly been gaining mindshare as a powerful and easy to use MVC framework for PHP. Mimicking Ruby on Rails, it allows developers to quickly prototype and build database driven websites and web applications. With increased popularity books usually follow. “Practical CakePHP Projects” by Kai Chan and John Omokore is one such book. It is aimed at advanced PHP developers who have some experience with CakePHP and builds on books like “Beginning CakePHP” (Apress, 2008). The book promised to show how to build practical, real-world web applications using the CakePHP frameworks.
Unfortunately “Practical CakePHP Projects” only partially succeeds in that. It is refreshing to see how applications are built that are different from the proverbial “blog” or “store” example (though both are used in the first chapters), but I find myself disagreeing often with how these applications are built. The chosen solutions often seem to work against the framework instead of going with it.
This article was originally posted at LXer Linux News.
DocBook XML to PDF on Debian Lenny
by Sander MarechalI have recently been writing some documentation in DocBook XML format that I wanted to convert to PDF. Debian has a really useful package called xmlto that you can use for this, but it did not work for me. The xmlto tool converts DocBook to PDF through LaTeX and I was getting all kinds of errors. Instead I opted to use the DocBook-XSL stylesheets to convert DocBook to fo and use Apache fop to convert it to PDF.
DocBook-XSL and Apache fop work wonderfully well but there were a couple of bumps that I had to sort out before everything worked as it should, especially regarding the Java setup and getting images to work correctly. Here is how I set up my DocBook toolchain on Debian Lenny.
