Project Runspace exists to help up-and-coming server administrators find their way in the world of IT. We welcome all work that forwards that goal. So, the title “Windows Server Administration Fundamentals” by Bekim Dauti caught our attention. I have read through the book and prepared a thorough review of its contents.
Disclaimer: Packt Publishing offered me a free copy of this book in exchange for a review. I was not given any other compensation. No one at Packt gave me any direction on what to write or how to write it. They also did not offer any incentives to write favorably or deterrents against negativity. Everything in this article is my own honest opinion about the book.
Overall Summary
I would recommend this book to new Windows Server administrators as a launchpad. It includes discussions about the topics that you must know and subjects that you will encounter throughout your career. It covers several core items with sufficient depth. However, I would caution against relying on it as an ongoing resource. The book takes on too much to handle any topic thoroughly. Many places will leave you with more questions than answers.
It serves appropriately well for more experienced administrators looking to catch up with recent advancements in Windows Server. Again, its breadth hurts its depth, so it does well at introducing subjects you might not have known about, but you will need to do substantial research on your own for anything beyond surface-level familiarity.
Critique: The Good
Windows Server 2025 Administration Fundamentals, 4th Edition covers just about every aspect of Windows Server 2025. You would struggle to find a match for its scope anywhere else. Even better, it starts with instruction on things that you really need to know before you can even start to administer Windows Server, such as TCP/IP.
I especially liked that its author wrote it like an author. Much of the material that I encounter today reads like it was copied from a class transcript. Authors write in a way that seem like they expect instant feedback from a live audience. Effective writing differs from effective oral presentation, so you cannot simply duplicate one medium into the other. I did have problems with the writing style used in this book, but at least the author presented his words in a way that was intended to be read.
My favorite chapter was “What to do After Installing Windows Server”. I have long felt that too much material shows how to install Windows or Windows Server and just stops there. Thirty years ago, successful installation of a Microsoft operating system was an accomplishment. Today, it’s not. Too many installation guides leave readers with a feeling of, “OK, now what?” I appreciate Dauti for writing an entire chapter specifically to combat that.
Critique: The Bad
Unfortunately, the book gets in its own way frequently and to its severe detriment. Some of this relates to its status as a fourth edition. Some of it, I’m not sure of the cause. What the author did not catch, the technical reviewer should have.
Errors:
- References to Nano Server appear frequently; Nano Server did not live long at all, and certainly not something you can use as part of Windows Server 2025. Furthermore, it lists Hyper-V as one of the preferred use cases for Nano Server. That ability was taken away early in Nano Server’s short life. The end of Nano Server happened long enough ago that it should not still appear in new works like this.
- Only a few mentions of PowerShell and Windows Admin Center, and almost no examples or screenshots of their use. The aging and practically deprecated MMC tools dominate the book. I would caution new administrators against becoming too attached to these tools, and certainly would not use them as a primary learning platform. PowerShell should be preferred at the moment, as it will live forever, works with just about any Microsoft technology, and the sooner you become proficient with it, the better. The future of the GUI tools are in question, but teaching WAC is likely to be more useful than MMC. This point especially comes to a head in the section on Windows drivers, which are only shown in this book as Device Manager. Device Manager does not work on Windows Server installed in core mode, nor does it work on remote systems. The book does not even mention device management in WAC or the pnputil utility.
- The explanation of NTFS and SMB permissions comes far too late in the book and is outright inadequate. I remember my time as an MCT pounding into the heads of my students that “DENY ALWAYS WINS”. This book does not even mention that. Not learning the behavior of permissions early will burn administrators until they take the time to get it right. This is the kind of work where I expect to find those exercises.
- The coverage of DNS is likewise inadequate. Administrators who don’t understand DNS will have extensive problems with Active Directory. The subject deserves much more in a book like this.
- A lot of advice and items marked as “best practices” are out of date or incorrect. For instance, we have moved away from password rotation, but the GPO section recommends it.
- Refers to SMTP setup as a “crucial” skill. It never was “crucial”, and it’s not even possible in Windows Server 2025. The book fumbles on that, then clumsily tries to recover with coverage of Exchange Server. Even rudimentary Exchange Server goes well beyond the scope of an introductory Windows Server book. We have very good reasons for not sending rookies off to install Exchange on their own.
- Other things that are inadequate or incorrect:
- Remote Desktop Services will not install the way this book shows, and even the most basic RDS deployment requires much more than this book implies
- Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter is gone, and has been for a while
- Don’t use Generation 1 Hyper-V virtual machines unless you have to run legacy operating systems as guests
- Automated Storage Tiering gets the incorrect acronym “ATC”, then is referred to as “Network ATC” throughout the remainder of its section. Network ATC is a completely different technology from Automated Storage Tiering
- Kind of nitpicky, but the book says that 64-bit architectures “enforce driver signing” (p. 451). That’s 100% false and can lead to some invalid security expectations. CPUs don’t even really understand hardware, much less drivers. Leaving this in there kind of makes me think the author doesn’t really know much about CPUs. Windows and Windows Server enforce driver signing, and have for quite some time. However, even though Microsoft makes it difficult, you can bypass that. Other operating systems do not enforce driver signing.
I found other errors, but mostly did not think them egregious enough to mention. I’ll talk about a couple more in the next section. That said, remember that this book has over 500 pages of content. Expect errors in a book of this size. It gets far more right than it gets wrong.
Critique: The Ugly
While I like a lot about this book, it has problems that impede its mission. I will put a lot of that at the feet of the editors. They should catch things that will cause readers to stumble and give the author feedback and opportunity to improve the work.
I identified three major problems that pervade this book:
- Language usage
- Scope creep
- Focus and Organization
Language Usage Problems
I mentioned that I liked that this book was written in a way that was intended for readers, and I meant that. Unfortunately, it also feels highly templated. It seems like dozens of sections have an opening paragraph of the format “X is crucial/vital/essential” followed by some text that might or might not explain X, then a closing paragraph of the format “understanding X is crucial/vital/essential, now we’re going to talk about Y which is crucial/vital/essential”, and then the pattern repeated. Entirely too much text is spent on this kind of useless, decorative language. The #1 thing that new administrators need from instructional work is clarity, and this book’s ratio of clear, useful text to flowery, buzzword-filled marketing goop skews much too far in the wrong direction. I estimate that the entire book would be at least 20% shorter just by deleting sentences that add nothing to comprehension.
As it introduces items, it seems to always tell the reader that they’re “crucial”. This book uses the word “crucial” so often that it will be several years before I see it anywhere and don’t have a flashback to this book. Aside from the obnoxiousness factor, it’s wrong. For one thing, saying that every single component of Windows Server is “crucial” is like going into your to-do list and marking every item as “top priority”. If everything is crucial, nothing is crucial. The book would work better if it just didn’t say anything like that about anything. And really, maybe 15% of the stuff in this book ranks as “crucial” for every person who could make use of Windows Server fundamentals material.
Several topics include enough structuring that it seems like you’ll get a thorough how-to or dive into the technology, but then they… don’t. There’s just a lot of stuff that frankly looks like it was copy-pasted from a marketer’s fluff piece. If you’ve ever sat through some salesperson’s 20-slide presentation on some new software and at the end thought, “OK, but what IS it??”, then you know exactly what I mean. Sure, it’s a “crucial part of an administrator’s toolkit needed for efficient performance in today’s fast-paced IT world” but “WHAT IS IT??” That kind of language is distracting and entirely out of place for a “fundamentals” book. A bit would be OK, but this book has mountains of it all the way through.
As I was reading, I felt like the writing had the influence of a sixth grade composition teacher: make sure every section has an introduction and a summary and every paragraph has a transition. OK, great. That’s all very important for sixth grade papers. Books are not term papers. The rigid over-adherence to writing rules like that made it especially jarring when I encountered broken writing rules that should be used. For one, writers should never introduce an acronym without expanding it at least once. This book does that frequently. I don’t think it ever expands SDS even though it has an entire section on it. Worse, I think he means software-defined storage, but I cannot know that because the entire section is just a jumble of buzzwords. I gather that whatever he means by SDS is “crucial”, but I wouldn’t know how to begin to implement it because he never even tells me what it is. That was the worst example, but not the only example.
Chapter 11, which tackles security, is the book’s weakest chapter. It contains almost nothing of substance, and it makes action recommendations without giving any hints as to how to carry out those actions.
Scope Creep
If you’re not familiar with the term “scope creep”, it’s what happens when a project has a goal, but adds tangential pieces along the way. Scope creep can get out of hand and throw a project off target. This book suffers horribly from scope creep.
Scope creep happens, and it’s somewhat unavoidable. I knew that I would find things above fundamentals. On a straight read-through, a lot of things don’t seem especially crazy. But, it hits differently if you first look at the cover where it says “a beginner’s guide to managing and administering Windows Server environments”, then you turn to page 451 where you find “Having a dedicated response team on standby to address any issues…”. “Dedicated response teams” are probably not a thing we should expect beginning administrators to have control over (also, beginners, nobody has dedicated response teams on standby for patching, that whole section goes to some really weird places).
This book should drop topics that go radically beyond what new administrators need and use that space to show the basic things that it just hints at. Ideas: the book tells us how “crucial” dcdiag, repadmin, and other tools are, but never shows them in action or even provides links to more information. Those tools really are crucial. So… in the 5th edition, maybe amp those up.
Focus and Organization
Similar to its problem with scope creep, the book frequently loses focus. It often spirals out into an organizational mess. That leads to topics showing up in places that don’t make much sense, which makes the book difficult to use as a reference work. The technical and language editors should have helped out there, too.
One of the worst problems with the book is the scattershot way that it introduces Azure. There’s no doubt that we can no longer cover Windows Server adequately without introducing Azure. However, the touchpoints between Windows Server and Azure must be initiated from Azure and usually cost money. They don’t just appear out of the box in Windows Server in the way that this book often suggests. For instance, the generally problematic chapter 11 talks about several components of the paid elements of Microsoft Defender in Azure as though they just exist as part of Windows Server. It rarely shows them or provides sufficient explanation for how to get to them.
When it does finally take a full look at Azure, it goes into detail on parts that change frequently, like the arranging of licensing tiers and related features. I didn’t look, but I suspect many of these are already out of date, and the problem will only get worse. Tying back to the scope creep issue, none of this counts as a fundamental aspect of Windows Server or helps newcomers.
Things that show up in places that don’t make sense:
- Backup and disaster recovery (filed under updating and troubleshooting)
- CPU, memory, and other basic hardware (filed under tuning and maintaining, which never actually seems to get around to talking much about tuning or maintaining)
- Event Viewer — the book talks about the importance of monitoring events nearly everywhere throughout the book (that concept is spot-on), but Event Viewer itself shows up very late, in a chapter that bizarrely ties Windows Update and WSUS to troubleshooting
I also found several large chunks of topics nearly duplicated across chapters. It seemed like no one could find a true home for them, so they just showed up as multi-paragraph asides whenever they connected with a related topic.
How to Use the Book
Reading back over what I wrote, I feel like the review skewed negative. That was not my intent. I do think that the problems I found are severe enough to warn potential readers. But, I also think that, as long as you can keep these caveats in mind, there is a lot of good to be found in these pages. You’ll pick up fairly quickly when the author is about to spend a couple of pages bogged down in marketing-speak, so just skim until you get back to the good stuff. The places that explain things poorly at least give you enough information to start an Internet search. You will almost certainly encounter lots of things in these pages that you might not discover organically.
Do not try to use it as a comprehensive work, though. It has depressingly few complete walkthroughs, and its organizational problems prevent its use as reference material. Read it straight through, note the things that you want to learn more about or might value in the future, and research them separately.
I hope that the fifth edition addresses the current problems. This book has the potential to become a cornerstone of Windows Server education for people that like to read their way to knowledge.