Great Books theory. In the Great Books theory of education, there are certain great books that continue to have relevance. An example from the field of Literature would be Shakespeare. Of my University textbooks, the only one I've looked at much is the Dragon Book by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman; the one about writing compilers. There was also a Networking book that I've opened occasionally. Imagine of you had the GoF book on Design Patterns as a textbook! But no, we get books like "Java for Dummies" (I exaggerate), at least in some classes.

Of course, computing is a rapidly-moving field, so it may be another 20-50 years before it settles down enough that we know what the really great books are. HTH

There are a number of aspects to setting this sort of thing up. Here's what I'd be looking at:

1. Personally I recommend the tool called "puppet", especially making heavy use of the "augeas" module. cfengine is a traditional tool for this too. You may also want to use the tool "cobbler" with this. These tools between them would deal with deployment of new machines, and are especially useful for similar machine, as your dev/test/production machines are likely to be.

2. Someone recommended using packaging; that would be my personal suggestion.

3. People have been arguing SVN vs. Git. Use only one of these :).

You'll notice that the breadth of argument has occurred because there are quite a number of areas in which various pieces of sysadmin software could be used, and you haven't been clear about what areas you need covered. I'd recommend a post that clarifies what you're already using in each of these areas.

HTH,