Practical Ruby for System Administration

Introduction

It turns out that writing a book is pretty easy. Writing a book that is relevant to anyone but yourself—now that's far more difficult than I'd imagined. I love the elegance, simplicity, and power of Ruby, and I use it every day to make systems function at the ISP where I work. You would have thought that this combination of facts would make it straightforward to distill a few salient chapters on the matter. It doesn't. Indeed it took me nearly a month of trying to build a skeleton structure for the book before I realized that the problem was one of context.

You see, the target audience for this book is obviously system administrators, but that's about as helpful in narrowing the focus as asking a telephone company to connect you to ...