Preface

Welcome, dear reader, to the world's first comprehensive book about systemd and its ecosystem. Although systemd has become the world's most prevalent Linux init system, not all that much has been written about it. There is, of course, the official systemd documentation that you can find online. But it's rather terse and doesn't give you much in the way of practical examples. There are also some good tutorials in the form of blog posts, but most of them just cover the basics. I've only been able to find two other books with systemd in the title. Both of them are outdated and also just cover the basics.

My goal in writing this book has been to take you beyond the basics, to show you how to be a more effective Linux systems administrator. In every chapter, we'll be looking under the hood to see how systemd actually works. Rest assured, there will be plenty of hands-on demos to show you how to make systemd sing and dance just the way you want it to.