The Barnes & Noble Review
Open Virtual Memory System (OpenVMS) is here to stay; and "that's a good thing." If you need to learn how to manage OpenVMS, this outstanding book is the one to get you started. Dave Miller puts the operating system into perspective, using analogy to other systems to pave the road to understanding. Conversely, this book is not intended as a stand-alone. It is incomplete in that many commands are simply not mentioned. Of those that are, only a few of the many options are discussed. In other words, you cannot manage a system with this resource alone.
Miller starts with an excellent introduction to OpenVMS, its features, the pertinent history, and a tutorial that brings you up to speed. The book is divided into ten chapters, one for each of the most important system management tasks. Each chapter covers a definition of the management task and several examples of what needs to be done, using specific OpenVMS commands. For example, Miller takes you through the basics of the boot process, discusses licensing and installation, and explores user accounts. There are good sections on queuing and backup. Next he looks at monitoring and performance and supplies a good chapter on security -- a very serious concern these days. There is also a discussion on networking and another on clusters. Then there are the appendices: The author (in an unusual move) decided to include excerpts from five OpenVMS-related books from the same publisher, since he felt that this may be your first exposure to OpenVMS. Finally, the addition of a glossary at the end of each chapter, or as an appendix, would have made this book the ultimate OpenVMS resource.
Keep in mind, this is not a step-by-step, how-to-manage book. Instead, it introduces several areas of OpenVMS system management and, by describing why each is important and how it fits into the larger management task, helps you relate this book to other manuals and texts. John Vacca
John Vacca, the former computer security official (CSO) for NASA's space station program (Freedom), has written 38 books about advanced storage, computer security, and aerospace technology.
