Customer Reviews
All Sys Admins should own this - By: The Happy Space Invader, 24 Dec 2007 
I've lost count of the number of Sys Admins who have seen this book & scoffed at the awful 70's artwork on the cover, thinking that this couldn't possibly be relevant reading material for the 21st century. However, once I show them why it's such a good book, it invariably ends up living permanently away from my desk. In fact, I'm only writing this review after discovering that yet another copy of mine has wandered off permanently.
You see, apart from being an incredible introduction to Unix shell scripting, it also has an easy-to-understand explanation as to how the Unix shell itself processes the commands you give it. For that reason, alll Sys Admins should read this book, even if shell scripting isn't their thing. It only covers the Bourne & Korn shells, but serious Unix shell programmers wouldn't ever use anything else anyway.
An essential purchase.
Nice book, really cool! - By: , 20 Mar 2006 It is nice, excellent book for experienced user. I found it to be the nice, logical continuation to "UNIX essentials" DVD course ( I found on Amazon.com but since they do not ship outside US I ordered it directly from CustomFlix.com). They supplement one another very nicely & helpfully. It is easy to read & follow, the examples are clear & well described. Overalll very nice effort!
From Zero to Hero in no time - By: , 05 Jul 2004 I was a Unix novice until I read this book (not that I'm an expert now but I feel more confident when work with the OS). It was recommended to me by a collegue & it's great! It's a book for real techies & throws you straight into scripts & utilities from chapter 1. The examples are good & the exercises vary in difficulty from 'Give me something worth doing, this is too easy' to 'Hey, hang on, I take back my last comment'. There's a chapter about how the shell interprets commands before executing them which reallly good. The whole book is in plain english & easy to understand.
The only downside for me was that the reallly hard exercises don't have worked solutions (but it's fun trying out possible solutions). You can probably tell I'm a techie, so from one techie to another, this book is a must for any unix beginner.
Give them shell - By: B. Chandler, 30 Sep 2003 No book can be the end-alll be-alll in shell programming. Nevertheless, this one comes close. I used it to learn the basic understanding of UNIX. Then keep it as a reference. I even buy new copies of it as it is revised. The on line man pages used to give examples that worked; however there are not enough or not at alll on some commands. This book has also contains the why & concepts of UNIX. It is better than those beginning to learn UNIX books are are & rivals the pure reference manuals. Some people go to sleep in classes & others have comprehension problems with a bunch of words. This book has simple workable examples that help you get on with your work. For the speed, you need & at a price you can afford, UNIX shell Programming is what you are looking for.
A good update to a classic techie book. - By: , 16 Apr 2003 
I've had about 5 copies of the first edition of this book nicked off me over the years it's that good. So, when a colleague of mine with no scripting experience wanted to learn I bought this book for her & replaced mine at the same time.
The book has been updated so that the examples shown are now in the POSIX shell which has slightly different syntax to other more widely used shells but the book does give alternative syntax in case your machine doesn't have the POSIX shell available.
The first edition is the book I bought to learn shell scripting with back in 1991 & I can remember getting reallly hacked off that the book didn't have answers to the exercises. This second edition solves this by having a supporting website where you can see the answers, note the errata & even download the examples! (You couldn't do that easily in 1991)
I haven't given it 5 stars because of the book's use of the POSIX shell in the examples - & you have to hunt for the alternative syntax - which might be confusing for beginners. Fortunately, most of the shells are having POSIX functionality added to them so they're slowly becoming POSIX compliant.
However, in the meantime any sysadmin worth their salt can always installl the POSIX shell, alll the commercial UNIX distos & most of the Linux distos have it.
