About This Website

Welcome to Otterbook.com, the website spawned to support and augment the book Automating System Administration with Perl and its previous incarnation, Perl for System Administration. Interested in System Administration or Perl? You’ll find all that and more here (not to mention the occasional sea otter). This site is strictly a labor of love for me. It is not connected to nor sponsored by O’Reilly, my employer or any other organization. The Secretary will disavow all knowledge of my actions.

About This Book

Please see the book’s page.

About This Author

Working: I’m a sysadmin by trade and by nature. I like long walks on the beach, black and white films, the smell of puppies after an early summer rain, and so on, but mostly I like system administration. I’ve been a sysadmin for almost 30 years. As sysadmins go, I’m largely a synthesist. Which leads to…

Talking: I enjoy presenting invited talks at conferences like LISA and CHIMIT. In these talks I’ve tried to find the burning coals from other professions that could be used to set our field on fire (or at least help us deal with some of  the challenges sysadmins face). I’ve created and taught both Perl & Sysadmin classes and the popular “Over the Edge System Administration” (creativity and sysadmin) series of classes at various conferences. More information about these and other classes I’ve taught can be found on the classes page. There’s a similar page for my invited talks/keynote presentations.

Writing: Besides the book, you can find my verbiage in a number of different places including USENIX’s ;login magazine where I have a column called Practical Perl Tools. In a previous life I used to write a whole bunch about world music.

Website Credits and Trademarks

• WordPress using the Thesis Theme
• Head shot photo credit: Heison Chak, used with permission
• Cute Follow me on Twitter icon courtesy of Randa Clay Design
• The use of an otter image with the topic of Perl is a trademark of O’Reilly Media. I convinced him to say “whoa!”