Chapter 1, Introduction and Environment Setup, explains how to set up a vanilla environment so that you understand what Vagrant does behind the scenes, and why we do what we do in terms of installation.
Chapter 2, Remote Administration with SSH, helps you understand the marvel that is SSH, and how it can make your life not only easier, but significantly better.
Chapter 3, Networking and Firewalls, covers a topic I find to be more of a pain than any other, networking and firewalling. We're going to look at the importance of each of these.
Chapter 4, Services and Daemons, inspects the nature of daemons, hunting them down, and killing them when they get too power-hungry. Services are also covered in this chapter.
Chapter 5, Hardware and Disks, covers the most treacherous part of any system, the hardware. Here, we'll talk about the evils of disks and how you might go about troubleshooting a physical system.
Chapter 6, Security, Updating, and Package Management, covers the stuff that makes servers useful. Packages have to get on systems in some way, shape, or form, and here, we'll investigate how they do it!
Chapter 7, Monitoring and Logging, explores the two topics most sysadmins groan at, knowing they're important at the same time. We're going to look at why you need both sensible monitoring and robust logging.
Chapter 8, Permissions, SELinux, and AppArmor, covers the innate security systems in place on a lot of servers, no matter how painful they might be to use and configure. Here, we'll talk about their importance.
Chapter 9, Containers and Virtualization, explores a favorite topic of mine, the segmentation of operating systems and how you might go about accomplishing such an arcane task.
Chapter 10, Git, Configuration Management, and Infrastructure as Code, discusses the importance of not losing your configuration when your computer randomly dies, and the ease with which solutions can be spun up and torn down.
Chapter 11, Web Servers, Databases, and Mail Servers, looks at some of the core functionality servers can provide, underpinning the majority of what the internet was invented to accomplish: communication.
Chapter 12, Troubleshooting and Workplace Diplomacy, expounds some basic troubleshooting techniques, and contains a philosophical discussion on keeping your head in stressful situations. The author is something of an authority on this.
Chapter 13, BSDs, Solaris, Windows, IaaS and PaaS, and DevOps, is a fun final chapter on semi-related systems in the Linux world, some of which you'll definitely come across, and some which should have been greater than they turned out to be.
