Excerpt from the book Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook 
by Evi Nemeth , Garth Snyder , Trent R. Hein , and Ben Whaley
![Book cove for "Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook" by Nemeth et al. [Formatted]](http://unwisdom.org/chadspace/wp-content/uploads/unix-000000-formatted.jpg)
Text within quotation marks often has a precise technical meaning. In these cases, we ignore the normal rules of U.S. English and put punctuation outside the quotes so that there can be no confusion about what’s included and what’s not.
Excerpt from the book Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook by Evi Nemeth , Garth Snyder , Trent R. Hein , and Ben Whaley
The Wikipedia page for “system administrator” includes a nice discussion of the tasks that system administration is generally thought to include. This page currently draws a rather sharp distinction between administration and software development, but in our experience, professional administrators spend much of their time writing scripts. That doesn’t make system administrators developers per se, but it does mean that they need many of the same analytical and architectural skills.