“O’Reilly’s Latest Release Untangles Confusing Web of
Printer Management for System Administrators.“
“Computers were supposed to create the paperless office,
remember? We know that’s not true. The Internet has made more
information more easily available to computer users than ever
before, resulting in more printouts than ever before. “From the
user’s perspective, printing is still fundamental. Paper continues
to be a common way of sharing files, and paper still forms the
basis of our legal system. Most people print out agreements,
account statements, transaction confirmations and of course
information found on the Web,” says Matthew Gast, co-author of the
just-released “Network Printing” (O’Reilly, $34.95). “In spite of
its importance, almost nothing practical has been written about the
problem of printing. Many books have been written about narrow
pieces of the problem, but nothing addresses the problem as
comprehensively as ‘Network Printing’, taking into account that
real networks have many different types of clients and printer
hardware.”
“Recent years have also seen a proliferation in the number of
platforms that system administrators must support. In addition to
the Windows operating systems, administrators may also have to deal
with Macintoshes, a few flavors of Unix (Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, and
Linux), and possibly NetWare. “Print services are typically a
tangled web with a server for each client system and latent
interdependencies that can break at any time”, explains Gast.
“‘Network Printing’ helps administrators untangle this growing web
by unifying services on a single platform.”