Maybe there's a resurgence going on at O'Reilly. For a while, I felt they were very stagnated. The books were dull and proliferating faster than I could keep track. I may not have been the only one. All of by brick and mortar bookstores shrunk their computer book section substantially.

LAMP is a particularly strong trend for web developers. Although the P in LAMP could by Perl, Python, or PHP, in the web sense, it almost always means PHP. I worked with an early PHP advocate and he was very devoted to the language and even used it as an interpreter for shell-like scripts. I haven't seen anyone else use PHP in that way, but I have seen plenty of Perl and Python scripts littered around all sorts of systems.

If you are looking for a way to do all sorts of administration with one of the "P"s, this is not the book for you.

On the other hand, if you want to really understand how to think and build scripts from the Unix mindset, this is one of the best books on the market. The authors face one of the oldest problems in Unix (and maybe even other modern problems) - where to start? In the Unix shell, this is particularly problematic. The Unix shell is fundamentally small programs that are chained together for greater results. So, even in the early examples, they have to explain a plurality of tools to illustrate the results - like redirection, pipelines, sort, locales, and pagers.

This book reminds me of one of my favorite Windows admin books (http://www.isbn.nu/1578700477). Reading Classic Shell Scripting will make you a better admin.

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