The root user is nothing more than an account with a UID of zero. Any account with a UID of zero has complete control of your machine. This is important to note, some vendors create field service accounts under the name of field with a uid of 0. If you wouldn't give them your root password don't let them do this!
An alternate way of using root is the setuid mechanism we discussed earlier. Any program running setuid root is effectively running as root. Know these programs and what they do! We will discuss this in more detail when we go over security.
A public domain alternative to giving out root is a program called sudo, developed at the University of Colorado. This program runs setuid root and has a configuration file where you can grant certain users access to particular commands, such as mount. While this is better than giving people root, it does not always eliminate the danger and can give you a false sense of security.