This book trains you to be competent in managing Debian servers. Is this important or useful? Well, more than 10% of the internet websites are hosted on Debian servers, so understanding Debian is understanding the technology on which a sizable percent of internet businesses are built upon.

The book is almost 500 pages long, and touches all the topics that day to day system administrators need to deal with. It covers practical topics like how to deal with packages; how to configure networks; how to administer users; how to create a mail, ldap, apache, ftp, nfs servers; plus covering security essentials. In addition, the authors also discuss the history of Debian; how the Debian releases are prepared, how to become a Debian contributor and what is the Linux Kernel and how it works. So it provides a global introduction to to Debian and Linux from a system administrator perspective.

Having worked as a full time system administrator I can verify that the book gives you a good introduction to all the tools that you will need on the job. Given that the book touches several topics you might only retain a ‘flavor’ the first time you read it; but you know that you can consult the text more in depth in the future when you have a specific need.

Hence I would recommend this book primarily to people who are interested in following a technical career in Devops and System Administration. If you are a software developer you might be interested in “Chapter 1 The Debian Project” because it describes the lifecycle of a release: There you will understand why Debian (e.g Debian Buster) chose certain version of packages (e.g Python 3.5) instead of newer ones (e.g Python 3.7). And then you will see why your code might not work as intended when placed on production. If you have other type of background I don’t recommend the book to you.

You can get the book for free here.