Unix Shell Programming

by Patrick Wood, Stephen G. Kochan, Patrick H. Wood

Book Overview

UNIX Shell Programming, Revised Edition, shows UNIX users how to quickly and easily automate routine tasks by taking command of the UNIX shell. The shell makes light work of big tasks by transferring... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0672324903
• ISBN13: 9780672324901
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Sams Publishing
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Best book to learn Shell scripting

I started using Unix in 1988 and new nothing about shell scripting on Unix. I have been mostly working on PDP and VAX-VMS systems. Scripting in VMS was very mature using DCL. Anyway I had to learn scripting on Unix and bought this book in 1990. The best thing about this book is that everything is taught in small easy to follow examples. It really explains the ins and outs very well and is very suitable for self-study. I have recommended this book to quite a few people over the years and had only very positive feedback.

Extremly good and balanced intro for a programmer

Let me start by saying that most of the Unix tools like sed, awk, regular expressions, even vi, deserve their own specialized books and there are excellent books on these subjects. This is the only book you need as a general foundation to overall Unix shell environment. It is more convenient to start with this book and then dive deeper with the help of books like "Learning VI", "Mastering Regular Expressions". Yes awk is not covered, but it is not a big loss since awk was kind of not the part of native tools and it most definitely needed its own book to master as well as Perl. Then after you are done, most definitely for a daily use obtain "Unix Power Tools" This book is excellent for two audiences. For beginning programmers new to Unix. It should be their only general purpose Unix book, followed by specialized books. Also it serves to veterans that were away for a while from Unix and need just to brush-up very quickly without going to minute details of every tool. I for one, used this book as part of both audiences. I got acquainted with Unix with help of this book as well as refreshed my knowledge a year ago after long hiatus.

The best Intro book to shell programming.

I have had this book around for many years and I stillFind myself (and my colleagues) referring to this book.Over the years I have bought many shell books and certainlyHave found other books that cover certain aspects at greaterDepth. For example, the book definitely lacks a good coverage of awk and I have found O'reilly's sed & awkto be a very useful awk book. I also like `The new Korn Shell'by Morris I. Bolsky and David G. Korn for it's indepth coverageof the advanced features of Korn shell. But this is still the best Introductory shell programming book that I have come across.

Dated, but fantastic

I am a perl and C programmer, and I am very familiar with the shells outlined in this book. So the material was not particularly "new" for me. I can see how it would be difficult to understand for a user who was new to shell programming.If the intended audience is the intermediate unix user who knows something of programming, this book gets a full 5 star, my seal-of-approval rating. Terrific.One thing it is lacking is a brief mention of perl or of awk. In many cases, it is simpler to write:date | awk '{ print $2 }'instead of:date | cut -d' ' -f2or, at least from the standpoint of understandability and readability. but the book doesnt claim to be a manual for awk, and oreilly has an excellent book on the subject.I continually recommend this book to people, and where ever I go, I find this book on the bookshelves of successful people.

The best book in UNIX bourne shell for beginners

I have been using this book since 1992, and I have not seen anything better.First 100 pages should be mandatory for every person new to UNIX ( users, developers, systems administrators and system engineers ).There are errors, however I never got upset with that.