Review: Windows NT Server 4.0: Advanced Technical Reference

Review: Windows NT Server 4.0: Advanced Technical Reference

Windows NT Server 4.0: Advanced Technical Reference
The expert's guide to Windows NT Server 4.0
John Enck
Que Corporation
968 pages + CD-ROM, USD $59.99
ISBN 0-7897-1167-2

Commercial users are moving to Windows NT Server more and more. Although not as complex as the largerst Unix systems, administrating and keeping a Windows NT box running requires knowledge and expertise. Learning by trial and error is not the best way, and one solutions to this are books. Que Corp.'s solution is the book titled Windows NT Server 4.0: Advanced Technical Reference, by John Enck.

Although the book says it has been written by John Enck, actually the book has been written by numerous authors. As you can guess, a reference book consists of many (technically) detailed articles. Because one persons can't possibly master a whole WinNT system, it would be a good idea to let experts of a certain area to write that part of the book. As you read the book, you'll encounter well-known experts such as Jim Boyce, Mark Russinovich, Mike Greer and Jim Hoopes, to name a few.

The book itself is very complete, and at least scratches almost everything that Windows NT Server 4.0 is or can be used for. The approach taken by the book is clearly not theory (how something should work) by practice (how something actually works). The writing is clear and easy to read, but because there are numerous authors, you can quite easily notice, when the author changes. Of course, this book is mostly a reference, but sometimes the amount of technical information changes too much. For example, the article by Russinovich is technically very detailed (almost like a programmers manual ;-), but some articles are a far cry from this.

The book starts by telling you what NT Server 4.0 is, what it can be used for, and how to install and configure it. Next, you will learn how to use NT in corporate networks. You will learn about file and printer sharing, DHCP, WINS/DNS, and RAS and more. The fourth part opens your network to the public Internet. You will learn about IIS for example.

From here, it is logical to read about security and server administration. The security information given is good (I like that), but the lack of summaries is not good. Now you have to actively search for security tips.

The rest of the book is about optimizing and monitoring NT, and integrating it with non-Microsoft networks. Plus, there is information about WinNT Advanced Server. Appedixes include lists of online references, NT command references and of course a glossary.

To summarize, the book is valuable. Personally, I would have given more pages to some other topics, but this is of course only my humble opinion. The things I didn't like in this book was the lack of better summaries. Some of the articles could have had a small summary in a very compressed form, for example only a list of registry keys. Anyway, if you want to learn about Windows NT Server 4.0 as a whole, read this book. If you want to master some specific topic, read a more detailed book.

Points 4/5