I'm fairly new to the Cookbook format, but have found it very useful since it's task orientated, which means that you can quickly tackle your problem (assuming it's covered by one of the recipes) rather than having to read a whole book cover to cover. Of course as a reviewer you're forced to read the book in a more traditional sense.

This book contains over 150 topics, which range from the rather simplistic 'registering a domain name' right up to 'setting up a stealth slave name server'. The book is biased towards the more complex topics however and I have to say that I was out of my depth in many of the topics since I'm really a BIND beginner. It is here that the cookbook format starts to fall down. There is never a real sense that you have the basics under your belt. The author seems to acknowledge this and points the reader to DNS and BIND, co-authored by Liu and also published by O'Reilly.

Overall, the book is written in an accessible and readable style. I'd have no trouble recommending it, but I think that you should first have read the companion book to get the basics before you consider tackling this one.