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Windows NT is, as Gordon Letwin's expression goes, the all-singing, all-dancing operating system. It supports file sharing for a host of diverse clients, it can spool print jobs to every type of printer, it runs a gazillion network protocols, it slices, it dices, it makes Julienne Fries. There are, accordingly, a formidable number of configuration utilities and control panels that the Windows NT administrator must master. There is a GUI-based or command-line program (often both) for every eventuality -- sometimes several with overlapping capabilities -- and for those eventualities that Microsoft didn't foresee you can always take your life in your hands and edit the registry directly.
The documentation for Windows NT, alas, is not all-singing, all-dancing documentation. As Microsoft has grown ever larger, richer, and more arrogant, the printed manuals for Windows NT -- like all Microsoft products -- have become ever more meager and unreliable. I used to take the reference manual for a new system home with me and browse through it to get the lay of the land before tackling an install. In Microsoft's New World Order, this is hardly ever possible, or if the manual actually exists, it's rarely worth the trouble.* Of course, there's on-line documentation, but it's only suitable for isolated queries and the most desperate situations.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and book publishers have moved quickly to try and fill the gap. (In fact, a cynical person might speculate whether the deficits in Microsoft documentation exist for exactly this reason -- Microsoft first sells you the software, then when you notice that nothing came with the 600 MB of software on CD-ROM except a "quick installation" guide, they reach into your wallet again again via their captive publishing house -- Microsoft Press.) Unfortunately, many of the trade books that are available as Windows NT system documentation surrogates are merely rehashes of the already-deficient Microsoft manuals, or are churned out by hack authors who can't write with the perspective and authority that derives from extensive practical experience.
O'Reilly's Windows NT in a Nutshell is one of the few books, among the dozens that have appeared on this topic over the last year, that will be useful on a continuing basis for NT system administrators and network managers. It's compact and portable, it includes fairly detailed coverage of programs that Microsoft mentions only in passing (such as the TCP/IP utilities, Windows NT Diagnostics, and Network Monitor), and it collects all the command line information into one place for easy reference. Best of all, it is relatively inexpensive -- at $19.95, you can afford to buy several copies, put one next to each NT workstation where you perform any administrative chores, and take one home.
I must confess that I nearly tossed this book into the trashcan on the basis of the first 100-odd pages, which are devoted to a collection of diagrams of GUI menu trees and restatements of each GUI menu item on a program by program basis. Someone might find this approach helpful, I suppose, but I really can't imagine who -- there's useful information in the first section, but it's extremely fragmented. The rest of the book, however, atones for the ill-advised design of the first section. The chapter entitled "Uncommon Sense," buried in the back of the book next to the appendices, is a little gem -- it contains some especially valuable tips on system administration and network debugging.
Don't overlook the "Task Index" on pages 329-332. Here, at the very tail end of his effort, the author finally hits upon the organizational strategy that should have dominated the entire handbook. In future editions of Windows NT in a Nutshell, the task index should be moved to the front and drastically expanded, and the remainder of the book should be driven by its contents.
-- Ray Duncan (duncan@cerf.net)
* If your company belongs to the Microsoft Select Program, as mine does, you might not even get a printed license -- you just get permission to borrow the master CD-ROM from your company's Select Program coordinator long enough to do the install, and you have to keep a copy of your purchase order as proof of ownership.
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.
