I've bought the book and as for quality I have to say it is mediocre. It
starts out with descriptions of e-mail in general, qmail service, DNS and
SMTP. Then it runs through installation and configuration and advanced
qmail topics. The advanced topics cover mailing lists, daemontools (inetd
is covered in the text), POP and IMAP servers, PPP server and supporting
dial-in-clients.
I found Part I lacking and the book would have lost little if it had been left
out or trimmed down. Parts II and III were not bad but LWQ covered just
as much. It actually looks as if Blum took LWQ and just modified it just
a little. The PPP section is not that useful, I feel, to the beginning user
as it would be something an ISP would use but what ISP would want to
run qmail with inetd, which is what is used in the installation section.
I referred to the book for some of the control file descriptions. The
descriptions in the book are a bit more verbose than the man pages so
better for newbies.
Overall, I think that the book may benefit newbies who have had no exposure
to e-mail before and want to or have to set up a mail server (some of the
people
on this list would fit the bill from what I've seen). But for anybody
who's had
any experience with e-mail or is comfortable with unix admin I would recommend
Life With Qmail and the man pages. I set up my server using LWQ and the man
pages and haven't looked at the book since.
2 1/2 stars. Beginners only.
At 12:32 PM 9/6/00 +1100, you wrote:
>I just saw my first qmail text in a local bookstore, entitled "Running
>qmail". It's published by sams or someone, can anyone vouch for the
>quality (or lack thereof) of this book?
>
>r.
>
>--
>Russell Davies
>UNIX Systems Administrator
>Deutsche Bank
-
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