https://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administratio...

As a sysadmin, I recommend Tom Limoncelli's "Practice" books:

- https://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administratio...

- https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Cloud-System-Administration-...

Having a great Ops staff also helps ;) Of note is Thomas Limoncelli who wrote "The Practice of System and Network Administration" [1] and "Time Management for System Administrators" [2] works for Stack Exchange (formerly at Google). The Practice of System and Network Administration is basically the bible for most sysadmins, myself included.

ps. I only singled Thomas Limoncelli out as an example just to highlight the caliber of their Ops staff.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Management-System-Administrators-Thoma...

There isn't a coherent course. The closest I have found to a coherent set of ideas is http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration...

There's a rather large number of books you would have to pick up, if you wanted to go that way.

What follows is a set of guidelines, not rules. You want to know at least one scripting language (Perl, Python, Ruby), the Unix shell, and SQL. On the Windows side, you need to know Powershell, or equivalent scripting language.

You also need to grok logging, operating systems, and hardware to some level. (At least to be able to know when to make tradeoffs between space and access speed).

Knowing various models of IPC is useful (processes, threads, evented models).

You need to know networking (configuring a Cisco or Junpier device is a good, but not required skill). Knowing the fundamentals of routing, BGP, OSPF, IP, TCP, UDP, etc are essential.

Amongst common technologies, you need to know DNS, email, webservers, proxies, file storage and access.

Since you mentioned Quora, here's my answer to a similar question from there: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-college-courses-for-...

I'm a programmer, but believe it's important to be well-rounded. To balance my programming skills with sysadmin skills, I've started reading "The Practice of System and Network Administration":

http://everythingsysadmin.com/aboutbook.html

http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration...

The book was praised by multiple HN commenters ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665915 for example), and I'm glad I listened to their advice. I've only read a few chapters so far (it's a big book!), but I already like it. It contains a lot of good insights, and I like that it's not focusing on a specific OS / platform. Also, you don't have to read it in a linear fashion, you can pick and choose chapters depending on your current needs (moving into a new data center? implementing a security policy?). Thumbs up.

Because Google isn't links:

http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration...

I'm amazed nobody has mentioned the "Practice of System and Network Administration" book by Limoncelli and Hogan.

Highly recommended.

http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration...