Solaris Complete Reference Series

The purpose of this page is to provide support information for the Solaris Complete Reference series of trade books written by Dr. Paul A. Watters.

The Complete Reference series for Solaris covers releases 8, 9 and 10 in a separate volume. Despite the title, the books are not designed to provide a reference page for every Solaris or UNIX command or package - that would simply be infeasible in books that are typically under 1,000 pages long.

Instead, the books are written around sections with specific themes - such as Installation, System Essentials, Managing Users & Roles, Managing Filesystems, Networking, and Services & Directories - in roughly the order in which a sysadmin building a "greenfield" site is likely to use them. Thus, the usual order of operations would involve selecting and acquiring hardware, installing the operating system and associated applicatio software, building user and group directories, laying out filesystems, installing printers, getting the network running etc There are very few core operations which do not have at least some coverage.

One thing that I have noticed from reviews of the series is that readers would typically like to see more reference material. My honest suggestion is that if more detail is required for a specific command or procedure, then the best sources of information are man pages, or the Solaris administrator's documentation set, provided for free by Sun Microsystems. The Complete Reference series tries to fill the gap between knowing what you should be doing, and how to do it.