I took some time to look through Absolute BSD by Michael Lucas, available from No-Starch Press this morning at Barnes & Noble, and had to bring it home. For those of you either new to running FreeBSD or still not that comfortable with administering your FreeBSD servers, this book is for you.

In a moment of tragic fortune, my current FreeBSD installation got trashed this afternoon. So, I had to reinstall this evening. I am so glad that I had this book on hand. The section on drive partitioning is typical of the things I am loving about this book; it starts on page 10 of my copy. So many people dance around the topic of partitioning without committing to one approach or the other. Michael gives an excellent explanation of how to partition your disk subsystem and why he recommends certain choices, openly acknowledging that he knows that this will irritate the other half of the community who prefer another approach.

I have been looking for a resource to help me get my file, print, and DNS services in order, and this book looks like it will be a wonderful companion for those tasks.