What's on my bookshelf?
Here's some of the books I have on hand to help me in my day-to-day work. Some of these are used a lot, some not very often. There are reference books, and books that are more in the vein of "how it works". The titles link to Amazon.com, but I also use Bookpool and Barnes and Noble for my book buying. Whoever's got the best price, or sometimes, whichever store has it in stock.
Perl:
Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Christiansen, Erik W. Olsen (O'Reilly)
I've mostly used this to try to find Win32-specific information on Perl. It would probably be more useful to someone with less scripting background than I had, or someone with less access to actual Perl code to work from.
Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant (O'Reilly)
One of my most used Perl books. I read the first part, and have used the command reference uncounted times.
Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington, Larry Wall (O'Reilly)
It's certainly not a book to read cover-to-cover, but full of useful code pieces. This is definitely a resource that has been invaluable to me when I am trying to figure out how to do something.
David N. Blank-Edelman (O'Reilly)
I haven’t gotten quite as much out of this book as I initially expected. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have interesting things in it, just that I haven’t had much need for it.
Alligator Descartes, Tim Bunce (O'Reilly)
This is another book I haven’t put to as much use as I initially expected to. Maybe if I had more time to really work on database stuff, I could use it better. I just don’t enjoy DBA stuff enough.
Nancy Walsh (O'Reilly)
I bought this because it was on sale at Amazon. So far, I’ve stuck to using the CGI.pm module for my GUI development.
Jeffrey E. Friedl (O'Reilly)
I got tired of trying to work out regular expressions, so I bought this. I haven’t had any reason to regret that purchase – it’s been far more helpful than the basic overview in the camel book.
Scott Guelich, Shishir Gundavaram, Gunther Birznieks, Linda Mui (O'Reilly)
Another book I’ve only used a bit. I find Lincoln Stein’s book more useful.
Lincoln Stein (Wiley)
This is the CGI book I use. Since he wrote the module, I’d say his is the one.
Dave Roth (New Riders)
The first Dave Roth book, and really, the better of the two. I’ve got the first edition, and the worst thing I can say is that it’s light on the Lanman module. (Fortunately, Win32::Lanman comes with good documentation.) I think the second edition has more Win 2000 information, and many more Win32::Lanman examples.
Dave Roth (New Riders)
The “other” Roth book. Thinner and not quite as useful as the first one, but with more examples; it’s not at all a bad book to have on hand.
Everything Else:
Thomas Eck (MTP)
This one is definitely VBScript centered. However, it’s also an excellent overview of how to use ADSI, and it has a lot of example code. And, like it or not, ADSI is the direction Microsoft is pushing everything.
Tim Hill (New Riders)
This is a classic, and every NT administrator should have a copy. I haven’t yet looked at Hill’s new book, Windows Script Host.
Todd W. Mathers (New Riders)
I just got this book a few weeks ago, but I’ve already found it useful when the Windows 2000 / MetaFrame XP servers stopped working. I was able to find out what I needed to do quickly. (No one had installed Terminal Services Licensing, which is definitely a requirement in this scenario.)
Ted Harwood (New Riders)
This one is older, and has nothing about Windows 2000 or MetaFrame XP. However, it served me well and gave me a good grasp of how Citrix and Terminal Server work.
David Flanagan (O'Reilly)
Another book I bought on sale, this one at B. Dalton.
Paul Lomax, Matt Childs, Ron Petrusha (O'Reilly)
I got this at the same time as the Java book. It’s been more useful, particularly when I’m trying to translate from VBScript to Perl.
James D. Murray (O'Reilly)
I bought this one hoping to get some help on parsing event logs. I didn’t get quite as much as I was looking for, but it did give me a lot better understanding of how the event log service works.
Ashley J. Meggitt, Timothy D. Ritchey (O'Reilly)
This was one of the first books I bought when I became an NT administrator. There is some interesting information on using Perl to administer NT, but a lot of the code is out of date, since the module they use is no longer actively maintained.
Aeleen Frisch (O'Reilly)
Another early purchase, this one gave me some useful pointers on how to do my job. At the least, it was educational reading.
Paul Robichaux (O'Reilly)
Another book that was on sale at Amazon. I have found the documentation of the registry to be very useful. And don’t let the title fool you – it should read Managing the Windows NT and Windows 2000 Registry, but I guess that was too long.
Stacey Anderson-Reddick (O'Reilly)
Yet another sale book. It seemed like it might be useful at some point. If not, it was only something like five dollars.
Stefan Norberg (O'Reilly)
I just thought that this one looked interesting, and it has been.
Rick Darnell (Sams.net)
I picked this up on the clearance table at CompUSA. I just use it as a general HTML reference. It’s not the best one I’ve seen, but it works.
Matt Larson, Cricket Liu (O'Reilly)
I just ordered this one recently. Since I don’t manage DNS at work (that’s handled by Unix servers), I figured I should study up. At some point, I hope to be running and/or designing DNS and Active Directory for a living.
Alistair G. Lowe-Norris (O'Reilly)
This is another recent acquisition. It looks to have quite a bit of scripting examples, which of course makes it quite interesting to me.