The audience

If you are already a UNIX guru, this book might show you a few things you didn't already know, but not much more. Conversely, if you have never heard of UNIX before, you'll probably run into trouble beyond the first few chapters. However, if you have a good working knowledge of UNIX, maybe a couple years as a system administrator or support engineer, this book is for you.

Since we'll be working with SPARC assembly language and the C programming language, any programming skills you have will be useful while you read this book. However, we understand that not every system administrator is an experienced programmer. We have done our best to help those of you who have yet to gain those skills.