UNIX(R) Shells by Example (4th Edition) (Paperback)
Amazon.com Review
The second edition of Unix Shells by Examples shows off basic commands and utilities in the three most popular Unix shells–C, Bourne, and Korn–with side-by-side examples. The new edition of this book is sure to be a worthy reference for Unix programmers for getting around their favorite shell.
The best thing in this new edition is that the author presents short, effective examples of using basic commands and utilities for each of the three major Unix shells. This comparative approach means that you can use this book on different flavors of Unix and even migrate scripts between different shells. For each shell, the author provides fundamentals, like accessing profiles, command-line histories, and shell programming. “Lab sections” let you develop your skills with short, hands-on exercises for each shell. As in the earlier edition, the author’s short examples show you how to perform basic tasks quickly with common switches and options.
Other sections here cover three major Unix utilities: grep (for searching), sed (for editing), and awk (for scripting and reporting). (The reference and tutorial on AWK programming is a notable feature here. There is also good coverage of regular expressions.)
Instead of hunting down information in countless man pages, this book will save you valuable time every day with its efficient format and comparative approach–truly useful features for the beginning and intermediate Unix user. –Richard Dragan
Topics covered: C, Bourne, and Korn Unix shells; grep, sed, and awk utilities; regular expressions; and shell programming.
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Provides a complete, step by step guide to three essential UNIX shells–C, Bourne, and Korn–and three essential UNIX shell programming utilities-Awk, Sed, and Grep. Presents parallel coverage of all three shells, so it’s easy to see how they compare–and when to use each. Softcover. CD-ROM included. DLC: UNIX (Computer file).
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Posted on July 9, 2009 at 5:35 pm
The ‘Unix Shells By Example’ is a well-known book in the field of shellscripting. It has about 640 pages with a CD-ROM included. The book is well edited, with good white-spacing and clarity in layout. Having taught the unix shells for over 15 years, the author really knows her stuff, and the text is factual and to the point.The index seems complete and one doesn’t have a difficulty in finding the right info one is looking for. These properties should be normal for books, but computer books seem often an exception.
The chapters deal about the central unix-commands for scripting (Grep, AWK,SED) and the big three shells (korn, bourne and C-shell). The author explains the subject in great detail by showing examplescripts. First you’re given the data or text to be edited, then the script or commandlines and finally a lenghty line-by-line explanation of the scriptsyntax. The subjects of the scripts range from explaining the basic unix-commands to complex intertwining regular expressions, functions, obscure nawk options etc. The author also touches the subject of shell-history, making comparisons of the three shells, giving ‘lab-exercises’ and some unix background about commandtypes,login and inheritance. The apparent subject that is missing in this book is the Bash shell, the preferred shell in the Linux community. However, a seperate book on this subject is available (Linux Shells By Example). As with all books that have an extensive coverage of the subject, this book too can be overwhelming for the absolute beginners in shellscripting. It takes some time before one writes sytax like:
nawk -F: ‘BEGIN{printf(“What vendor to check?”);
getline ven <”/dev/tty”};$1 ~ ven
{print”Found” ven “on record no” NR}’ vendor
Instead of searching the pages for the basics, beginners should consider buying an entrylevel book. Conclusion: For the intermediate scripter who visits shellsites like shelldorado and lurks newsgroups in search of advanced programming constructs to steal this book is a great find. You won’t be left with a feeling that you’ll outgrow this book. For newcomers in scripting this should however not be the first book to buy, they’re better of with titles like “learning shellscripting in 24 hours”. But once through these 24 hours, this book can only be warmly recommended.
Posted on July 9, 2009 at 4:37 pm
If want to learn about shells and you learn by example, like I do, this book is essential.
The first 6 chapters (nearly 200 pages) goes over the basics of all shells; what they are, what they do, what programs are most used to manipulate data in them. There are whole chapters devoted to grep, sed and awk, and the author doesn’t skimp on details. You will be a virtual grep/sed/awk guru by the time you learn everything in these chapters.
Chapters 7-15 introduce and get you into scripting of each major shell: Bourne shell, C and TC Shells, Korn shell, and Bash (bash is the standard shell in most linux distributions). It then spends a chapter on general debugging shell scripting problems.
The last chapters touch upon system administrating via the shell (rather than using gui tools). Again taught by example so it’s very clear to the reader.
I learned more about bash (my shell of choice) from this guide than any other that I’ve read, and not for lack of trying, I’ve read several bash guides. I was happy to see that examples given were explained line-by-line so you don’t lose track of what is happening in each example. I was delighted by the useful appendices covering useful commands and giving side by side shell comparisons.
This is my favorite shell book to date.