Chapter Introduction

Author: Jeremy C. Reed reed NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/DragonFly

Reviewer: name contact BSD flavour

Welcome to The BSD Associate Study Guide: The Beginning BSD Unix Administration Book. This book is a quick reference and great way to quickly learn BSD administration skills. These topics are based on the objectives published by the BSD Certification Group in the 2005 BSDA Certification Requirements Document. The BSDA (BSD Associate) Certification is for BSD Unix system administrators with light to moderate skills. You can find out more about the BSDA and the goals and activities of the BSD Certification Group at http://www.bsdcertification.org

This book provides basic examples and pointers to further documentation and learning resources. This book is not a comprehensive reference. While this is a beginner's book, it is also useful for experienced administrators.

This book covers generic *BSD administration and specific skills as necessary for NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD.

What is BSD?

TODO:

Style of License
Family of Complete Operating Systems
Unix history and Experience
Modern and Innovative
Portable
Reliable and Secure
Community

Credits

This book was written by a community of BSD experts and fans who collaborated via a wiki website where anyone could contribute with writing, reviewing, proofreading and sharing valuable feedback.

TODO: this section might be partially generated from the list of known authors and technical reviewers.

Also thank you to Hiroki SATO and AllBSD.org for providing a server for hosting the initial book development website.

A huge variety of software was used to generate this book. The operating system hosting the Wiki and the book build systems is NetBSD. The Wiki is powered by IkiWiki with a few modifications to use "rcs" as the backend. The Markup language is handled by a modified version of Markdown. The book conversion to LaTeX is also done with a modified version of html2latex. And the book's PDF is generated using teTeX.

Conventions

TODO: this section will describe the format and typefaces used for examples, input, output, pathnames, etc. as to be seen in the final printed format. The style guide will document how this can be done in the wiki.