| Book helps sysadmins get a grip on Python |
Sep. 10, 2008
 O'Reilly has published a book on Python that touts the language's suitability for automating system administration chores. Written by Noah Gift and Jeremy Jones, Python for Unix and Linux System Administration includes a free, downloadable Ubuntu virtual machine, and examples of using Python to automate virtualization.
(Click for larger view of Python cover )
Python for Unix and Linux System Administration is aimed at sysadmins, IT managers, small business owners, and software engineers, say the publishers. It offers a particular focus on using the Python programming language to ease the challenges of virtualization.
Stated co-author Gift, "The art of systems administration has gotten more complex as virtualization has taken a hold in the datacenter. There is a need for a way to tame the Wild West of Virtualization and Linux, and Python is perhaps the perfect weapon. It is incredibly fast to code one-off solutions to automate a task, but often those one off solutions can -- and do -- turn into beautiful pieces of production code."
The book is organized by administrative issue, such as concurrency and data backup, offering Python solutions and hands-on examples for each. The authors built a free, downloadable Ubuntu virtual machine that includes the book's example source code snippets. The virtual machine runs examples with SNMO, IPython, SQLAlchemy, and others.
The Python book offers specific tips on how to:- Read text files and extract information
- Run tasks concurrently using the threading and forking options
- Get information from one process to another using network facilities
- Create clickable GUIs to handle large and complex utilities
- Monitor large clusters of machines by interacting with SNMP programmatically
- Master the IPython Interactive Python shell to replace or augment Bash, Korn, or Z-Shell
- Integrate cloud computing, and learn to write a Google App Engine application
- Solve data backup challenges with customized scripts
- Interact with MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, Postgres, Django ORM, and SQLAlchemy
Stated Gift, "It really is possible to do just about anything with Python and Linux from building a website, to automating a datacenter, to building really powerful command line tools."
Noah Gift is the author of open source projects including a Django web application called Diskbot, a rendering tool, and an automated software installation tool called osxsmartdeploy. Co-author Jeremy Jones is a software engineer who works for The Weather Channel.
Availability
O'Reilly's 456-page Python for Unix and Linux System Administration by Noah Gift and Jeremy Jones is available now for $50 ($40 for the PDF version). More information may be available here.
-- Eric Brown
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