I’ve just finished reading the new edition of “Practice of System and Network Administration”.
It’s just as good as I remember the first edition being. It’s not a technical book (in the sense of teaching you particular incantations) but instead talks about how you should approach running services right from less obvious areas like budgeting to how to work with building services professionals to get the right sort of machine room facilities. Also spends a lot of time on how
to build successful teams and how to have happy admins _and_ happy customers.
The sysadmin team in this book’s context would cover everyone in ISS and it would be a useful book for everyone to read (they even have a chapter for non-technical managers :->) – more relevant to us than Clive Woodward’s book on Winning!. One of the themes running through the whole book is the need for cross-group involvement and communication (between admins and customers; different groups of admins; admins and suppliers; etc) so that both sides understand what the real requirements and constraints are.