First let me say that I'm a big fan of simplicity, the “k.i.s.s.” principle you might say. Like many other IT professionals, I constantly find myself juggling multiple projects, each of which are at various stages, but under similar tight deadlines. While I like the detail of “how to” style books, the “quick and dirty” approach of technical writing has great appeal when you're under the gun to get a project done on time. This book falls somewhere in between those two categories.

The title of this book is somewhat misleading in this regard. In fact, it is not really a troubleshooting or quick fix guide at all despite having several troubleshooting sections. Rather, it is a well put together collection of common scenarios and configurations which contain step by step instructions on getting you to the finish line in record time. The author has, in my opinion, balanced the material carefully. That is, the amount of detail is not too much so as to be tiresome and yet not skimpy enough to have missed out key details. It takes a certain level of technical writing skill to successfully achieve this balance and the author has done a fine job, gearing the material toward the intermediate Linux administrator.

The book begins with a comprehensive review of networking principles followed by a detailed section on network troubleshooting. This is important as much of the remainder of the book deals with network related scenarios. Topics include DHCP, a good deal of material on Samba, wireless networking, firewalling with iptables, ftp, ssh, DNS (including dynamic DNS), Apache, sendmail, spamassassin, SNMP, MRTG, NTP, RAID, LVM, disk quotas, NFS, NIS, LDAP, RADIUS, web proxying via Squid, MySQL, VPNs, as well as various security related topics. As you can see, there is no shortage of good topics all in one book.

In summary, if you're just beginning your Linux journey, this book is likely not for you until you've had a few years experience under your belt. If you've already acquired that experience, this book with its distilled configuration and troubleshooting information will serve as an invaluable reference to many of the most common configuration scenarios you will encounter.