Unix? Shell Programming

by Ted Burns and Lowell Jay Arthur

Book Overview

Tap the Productivity and Power of the UNIX Shell... UNIX? Shell Programming Third Edition The Shell is the key to productivity and quality in the UNIX environment. And this new edition puts you in control of all Shell capabilities with completely updated tutorial and expanded quickreference materials. One of the most respected and popular UNIX Shell guides--the only one to cover all three Shells: Bourne, C, and Korn--it helps you... Use the power...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471599417
• ISBN13: 9780471599418
• Release Date: May 1994
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 462 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.5" 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.

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.

Can't get any better

I was hopping from bk to bk until now. This book is next to my throne :o). I pick it up and always learn a thing or two. I love the way it teaches you shell but it always adds ksh and bash. Plus there are charts periodically that give you syntax and explanation for sh, ksh, and bash. The advanced section goes beyond what I thought would be covered, and in simple terms.

Well, *I* think it's a great book!

I don't understand all the negative reviews here. Perhaps they're expecting something else out of this book: intro to programming, or hello world or something. Yes, it's a fairly advanced book, but that's what I wanted in the first place! I am writing this review because I came to this page to buy another copy of this book: I keep wanting a copy at home for hacking on my Linux box! Any basic tutorial can show you how to do basic if/then/else and loops and basic syntax rules. You need a book when you want to do something harder: mathematics, complicated scripts, etc. Best of all, it doesn't just cover Bourne and C shells: it also covers the Korn and Bourne Again shells (ksh & bash).This is not one of those books that was hacked out in four weeks because Technology X just became hot and every book publisher on the planet is scrambling to spit out 1600-page shelf-benders. The authors have taken a lot of time to put together a truly useful book.Books don't reach a fourth edition if they are so bad!