Until now it was easier to fit a herd of camels through the eye of a needle than find a good Domino book. Greg Neilson has done Domino administrators a service, putting together an excellent book, one which deserves to be on every Domino administrator's desk.
While most people these days tend to run Domino on NT, a Unix version has long been available, and last year Lotus released their Linux version. You can therefore run Domino on a RaQ3 or RaQ4, which use Intel-compatible CPUs, but you cannot run Domino on a Qube, which uses a MIPS CPU. The Domino adminstration tools, however, run only under NT (or Win9x or WinME), unless you get them running under Linux with the help of Wine.
Lotus Domino in a Nutshell is not the definitive Domino administration book. That has yet to be written. It doesn't explain in exhaustive, accurate detail how to work with and around Domino's many peculiarities.
What it does do is document how the various Domino administrative parts are supposed to work and what command options are available to you.
It's worth reading through at least once because you'll find all sorts of interesting tidbits which you may not already know. For example, NT has a setting which allows you to give foreground applications more attention than background applications, and,in theory, that should make Domino faster. It never made sense to me (if you're not logged in, how does NT know Domino is most favoured or most cursed?). And in fact it turns out that setting has absolutely no effect under NT Server, but it does affect performance under NT Workstation, which makes perfect sense. Another tidbit is that it's worth buying a Domino agent, if your backup tools provide such a thing, because you can then integrate the Domino logging tools to help you make a much more accurate restore than you would otherwise. I had simply assumed that the backup vendors (mostly an accursed lot, brothers in arms with the oiliest of used car salesmen) after having soaked you a thousand or two dollars for their main product hoped that you'd be just as foolish to let almost another thousand dollars dribble out of your pocket.
The Table of Contents is self-explantory, so I won't bother summarising each chapter. But if you need to run Domino behind IIS you'll find a very brief but useful chapter. The same is true of the ICM chapter - if you don't know what ICM stands for you're a lucky fish indeed and can skip that chapter.
My two favourite chapters are Chapter 13, which lists the server tasks and console commands, and Chapter 14, which describes in glorious detail the Notes.ini file.
There is a three page appendix on running Domino under Linux. It's worth reading before trying to install Domino on Linux, but it's obviously not going to be of much help on a Sunday evening when you're stuck at the office, your wife wants to know if you'll be home soon for dinner, and Sheila, your bright 4 year old is reminding you that you should have listened and gone with HP's OpenMail instead. But this is a minor quibble, and hopefully the author will find more useful tidbits to toss in here for the second edition.
Another useful appendix is the one on Net resources. There you'll find links to various Web sites and newsgroups, most of which I hadn't come across before, and some of them look quite promising.
If you administer Domino servers you'll want this book. You'll want to petition O'Reilly to have the author write the definitive Domino manual. If you do that you'll have to incur the wrath of his wife and children, but as he lives in Oz it might be safe to do. I'm not brave enough to do that, but, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
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