Bill Calkins' Biography

Book’s Bill has Written

You’ve heard the phrase ” Those who can, Do. Those who can’t, Teach” 

When it comes to technical training - don’t leave the opportunity to chance by risking your chances on the instructor. At UnixEd, you’ll get Bill Calkins, no substitutes. Many training organizations shuffle their instructors from city to city. Your class may get lucky and get a good one, maybe not. Maybe some even use Bill’s books in their classroom. The fact is, most instructors don’t get any more experience than what they’ve obtained from the classroom. 

Bill Calkins continues to improve his knowledge working as a consultant and Sr Level Administrator at Fortune 500 companies around the country. Then, when it comes to delivering his courses, he brings this experience to the classroom. He believes that there is simply no substitute for real life experience and this is especially true for instructors.

 Click here to read what his Student’s and other Training providers say about Bill’s courses.


Bill Calkins is Sun Certified for the Solaris Operating Environments. He is owner and president of Pyramid Consulting, a computer training and consulting firm located near Grand Rapids, Michigan, specializing in the implementation and administration of Unix and Microsoft Windows-based systems. He has 20 years of experience in Unix system administration, consulting, and training at more than 300 different companies. Bill is known world-wide for the Solaris textbooks he’s authored, which are currently best sellers and used by Sun Microsystems, universities, and training organizations worldwide.

Bill has worked as a consultant for Sun Microsystems developing training and testing materials for the Certification and Educational divisions of Sun Microsystems. Current projects with Sun include creating training and testing materials for the Solaris 10 System Administration, Network Administration, Performance Monitoring and Tuning, and System Security courses and certification exams. Bill has also been involved in the creation of Sun’s Solaris simulator which will transform the certification testing environment from a question and answer format to hands on simulations.

Bill has also developed in-house E-learning courseware for Hewlett Packard’s worldwide technical pre-sales group and in-house SME’s. The courses were developed to describe technical differences between the HP-UX and Sun Solaris operating environments. Topics include the user environment, clustering, networking, system administration, security, virtualization, and performance. Bill developed all of the courseware and delivered the classes via HP’s web conferencing environment, receiving an overall rating of 4.5 (on a 1-5 scale with 5 being excellent).

Bill is the principal owner and developer of UnixEd.com- a website dedicated to providing Solaris certification study and training materials with over 4,000 registered members.

Drawing from his many years of experience as an Open-Systems consultant, Bill has worked as an instructor in both corporate and university settings helping thousands of administrators get their Unix certification. His experience covers all varieties of Unix, including Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, Linux, True64, and SCO. When he's not working in the field, he leads the West Michigan Sun User’s Group, writes Unix books, and conducts training and educational seminars on various system administration topics. He frequently hosts the live technical forums on SearchSolaris.com (http://searchsolaris.techtarget.com). He draws on his many years of experience in administering Solaris, HPUX, and AIX systems to provide a unique, unbiased, approach to Unix consulting and training.

Bill has trained and donated of his own time to make sure that the members of the United States Armed Forces and those contractors that support and administer GCCS (Global Command and Control System) are up to speed, competent, and certified on the Solaris operating environment. As a result, he was presented the following award by General Mark Bowman of the US Army:

Book’s Bill has Written

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CENTCOM cert of appreciation

Solaris Instructor HPUX Instructor HP-UX Instructor Unix Instructor Linux Instructor