Unix for the Impatient

by Paul W. Abrahams and Bruce R. Larson

Book Overview

Introduction: UNIX Background. The POSIX.2 Standard. Typographical Conventions. Syntactic Conventions. Getting Started This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201823764
• ISBN13: 9780201823769
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 864 Pages
• Weight: 2.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 7.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

One of the best UNIX books I've seen

This book is a wonderful resource for someone comfortable with computers but new to UNIX. It covers a lot of introductory topics with minimum wasted space. The authors don't go into any single subject too deeply, so it's not overwhelming to someone who just needs to get around on a UNIX system, but it's nonetheless very information-rich, and by the end of the book they cover some surprisingly complex topics.I highly recommend this book to anyone starting off in UNIX, be it user or sysadmin.

Great for the not-quite-beginner

This is a great book, but it's not for the Unix novice. For them, there's Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours. After you get through that, buy this book. I'm a 20-year mainframe veteran who last saw Unix in college, before it had nice things like shell scripts. This book was overwhelming when I first returned to the Unix world; however, after a little experience, this book is an easy and incredibly informative read.

The one I didn't sell back!

Of all the UNIX books I've purchased (and there have been many), this is the only one I have used as a novice, and can continue to use to this day. One way to rate a book is to ask yourself how much it helped you as a novice, and whether you can still use it once you've become a more advanced user. While my other UNIX books are being sold to co-workers and used book stores, this is the one book I can consistently use as a reference. This is the one I will never outgrow.

Perfect for programmers new to Unix

Face it, if you're a programmer, you don't need a book to be telling you the basics of computers all over again. You want to figure out how to use the shell, the text editors, the many programming tools available, and a load of other things that you figure Unix will let you do, but don't quite know what those tools are yet.This book showed me a lot of stuff I didn't suspect existed in Unix, is broad yet appropriately detailed, and doesn't bore you with computer newbie stuff you already knew from other OS's. Get it.

The best Unix introduction for computer-literate readers

This is one of those rare books that does exactly what it claims. I have programmed in many languages and used many operating systems; I didn't need a book that explains what a file or a directory is. What I wanted was a book that let me map my previous knowledge of other OS's to UNIX: how do I cut out a column of info from text file? How do I use the file security methods? What can I find out about my running processes? How can I get a job to run in the background? For questions like this the book is perfect. It assumes you know about computers but don't know UNIX. This is probably the single most useful computer reference book I own. If this book doesn't meet your needs, then you're on your way to being a power user, in which case I recommend the O'Reilly "UNIX Power Tools" book.