Sincerely, if someone had asked me to write a book a few years ago, I would have certainly answered that it was impossible for several personal and professional reasons. There have been many events since I taught my first course at Sun Microsystems at the beginning of 2001 (at that time, I worked on Sun Solaris 7). Nowadays, I am thankful to keep learning more about this outstanding operating system from many excellent professionals around the world who could have written this book.

I have to confess that I am a big fan of Oracle Solaris, and my practical experience of so many years has shown me that it is still the best operating system in the world and, for a while, it has also been incomparable. When anyone talks about performance, security, consistency, features, and usability, it always takes me to same point: Oracle Solaris.

It is likely that there will be people who disagree and I can try to explain my point of view, attacking other good operating systems such as Linux, AIX, HP-UX, and even Windows, but it will not be very effective or polite. Instead, I think it is more suitable to teach you the advanced features of Oracle Solaris and its use cases, and you can make your own conclusions.

Oracle has invested a lot of money in Oracle Solaris that has been improved a lot because many good and advanced features have been introduced since then and it is at this point that this book begins.

Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced Administration Cookbook aims to show and explain dedicated procedures about how to execute daily tasks on the Oracle Solaris 11 system on a step-by-step basis, where every single command is tested and its output is shown. Additionally, this book will be committed to reviewing a few key topics from Oracle Solaris 11 intermediate administration, and all the concepts from basic and advanced administration will be introduced according to need in order to help the reader understand obscure points.

While I was writing this book, I learned a lot and tested different scenarios and ways to bring you only the essential concepts and procedures, given that all commands and outputs came from my own lab. By the way, the entire book was written using an x64 machine because most people have difficulties in accessing SPARC-based systems.

Finally, I hope you have a great time reading this book as well, just like I had while I was writing it. I hope you enjoy it!