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Title: Pcweek How to Implement Microsoft Nt Server 4.0 by Ziff-Davis Press, John W. Taschek ISBN: 1-56276-476-4 Publisher: Que Pub. Date: November, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.99

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Good place to start learning about Windows NT
Comment: Mark Twain once said that he did not have enough time to write short stories, so he was forced to write long novels. There seems to be a lot of Mark Twain wannabes writing computer books these days. Perusing the latest NT titles, one gets the feeling that there is an unwritten requirement that technical books must be at least 3 inches thick.

Many NT books that claim to cover numerous topics come in at well over 1200 pages. Not only do such books kills a lot of trees, they also are rather difficult to read while standing on a bus or subway.

How to Implement Microsoft Windows NT Server 4 humbly comes in at a rather modest 425 pages (or about 3 pounds). Rather than trying to cover every imaginable feature of NT, it assumes that the reader has a substantial level of NT knowledge and is geared for more of an advanced user, as opposed to one that needs 20 pages of screen shots on how to install a printer driver.

The book is divided into 8 parts, compromising 39 chapters and 5 appendixes. As stated earlier, the book get to the heart of the technical issue at hand, rather than spending scores of pages on a relatively simply idea. Some chapters are as short as 2 pages, sparing you the often unneeded screen-captures than can add up to over 50% of a books page count.

Parts 1 -2 (chapters 1-10) deal with the initial setting-up and configuration of an NT server. One of the enigmas of NT is that it is so easy to set-up, that inexperienced administrators can often set-up a system in a manner that later does not work or scale well. The authors write that no matter how good or easy Windows NT Server is to use, it still is a complex operating system. Given that caveat, throughout the book, it notes crucial areas in the installation and configuration process where utmost caution is required.

An interesting point brought up in chapter six is about the infamous Intel Pentium bug. For the vast preponderance of NT Servers, the presence of a defective Pentium processor will have no effect. This obviously can not be said for a workstation, but for an NT Server, there is little point in attempting to fix the problem via software. For those users that somehow feel the need to perform this fix on a server, the author's write that the work-around may even harm system performance. The bottom line: Apply those patches carefully and selectively.

Parts 3-4 of the book (chapters 11-25) accomplish in a little over 100 pages what other books take over 500 pages to state. These chapters detail the bulk of the configuration of an NT Server. Chapter 22 provides an excellent overview of the issues involved with directory replication. NT has the ability to replicate directories and data across servers. Replication is one of those little used, yet powerful features of NT. Don't get all excited and throw out your copy of ArcServe, replication is meant only to copy specific directories and was never meant to replace an enterprise-wide backup solution.

Knowing that NT servers do not exist in a vacuum, Part 5 enumerates how NT can co-exist with other network operating systems. There is a good overview on how to configure NT to operate with Novell NetWare, and for those Microsoft bigots, how to migrate from NetWare to NT.

One of the key selling features of NT is its bundling of Remote Access Services (RAS). RAS is both powerful & (when it works) easy to setup. Part 6 takes about 35 pages to go over the RAS topics.

Part 7 specifies the particulars of setting up NT for the Internet. It details the native Internet services available to NT and how the Internet Information Server operates. Other peripheral issues such as web page creation, configuration DCHP, DNS & WINS are dealt with.

Part 8 ends the book with every NT geeks favorite section, how to tune and tweak NT for maximum performance. If you are into topics such as how to set threads, processor priority resolution and pagefile optimization, you will love this chapter. The five bottlenecks of system performance are revealed.

As stated at the beginning of this review, the benefit of this book is its scope. This book is not for everyone. If you desire a title that will walk you through all of the steps involved in a specific process and the secondary minutiae, this is not the title for you. This is not a "for dummies" type of book. It is written for the accomplished to expert level of user. And for those types of system administrators, they will really appreciate it, and how you don't need a U-Haul to carry it around.