Best Shell Books Reviews

This is a very solid introductory book from the authors that were in the field for more then 20 years. The first edition was published in 1985 I still have it. It looks like a Guinness record for a computer book: twenty years in print ;-)

Although the content is rock solid this this is still Born shell so it's OK only as an introduction, when both Bash and ksh93 have a disadvantage of being too complex and fat

Great beginners' text, November 1, 2004

Reviewer:

Ramy V. "Ramy" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

A clear and concise intro text for beginners. Wording is kept short clear and to-the-point. Examples are very clear. Exercises are not tricky and test your plain knowledge of what you covered. Chapters are short. It is clearly a beginner oriented text and is not intended for advanced users.

Good guide for beginners, April 6, 2004

Reviewer:

A Williams "honestpuck" (Neutral Bay, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and NCR made Unix computers I first started to program for a living. Back then when someone said `script' they meant a shell script, generally for a Bourne shell.

Now that we have languages such as Perl and Python, much of shell scripting has been forgotten. The need still arises for the times and places where running Perl would be just that little bit too much overhead; cron jobs, process start and stop scripts, even machine start and stop scripts. For these we could best go back to the old ways. Combining the power of the common Unix tools, pipes and scripts in a fairly obscure and slightly arcane syntax is not easy to pick up, though the language's simplicity does, in some ways, make it easier than more complex ones such as Perl. Unix Shell Programming, Third Edition does a good job at introducing shell programming and I found it an excellent book when I needed a refresher.

I don't want to sell this volume short: you won't just learn about shell programming. The first ninety or so pages provide an excellent guide to getting the best out of the shell, and the last chapter is devoted to the features specific to an interactive shell such as command-line editing and using the history.

The authors have chosen to use the POSIX standard Bourne shell (`bash', available on many *nix systems, is a superset of the POSIX standard). That seems the right decision, given that it is so universally available and usually the default shell.

The book is well structured, starting out with a brief look at *nix operating systems before introducing the shell followed by some basic tools; cut, paste, sed, tr, grep, sort and uniq. One minor quibble, the book explains how to redirect STDOUT to a file and STDERR to a file, but not how to redirect both to the same file. That aside, these few chapters provide a good introduction to the shell.

The text goes on to systematically explore shell programming starting with variables and arithmetic. The chapters are kept short, in a good order and have a number of exercises at the end of each. The structure of the book and the order each new concept is introduced is well thought out; at each stage small examples are given that only use material already introduced and are complete in performing a task. In early chapters they are fairly trivial but by the end there is a fairly complete rolodex program written in shell script that would be a good model for anything you wished to do.

There is also a good summary of the shell syntax and common commands in Appendix A and good `Further Information' in Appendix B. Kudos must go to the authors for a list of books for further reading that is not ashamed of mentioning other publishers, indeed they say "One of the best sources of books on Unix-related topics is O'Reilly and Associates" and list volumes from them before mentioning their own publishers.

There are some small typographic errors in the text but I did not find any in the script examples I tried. I found it to be well written and readable throughout, perhaps an advantage of a third edition in a slow moving technology.

I would recommend everyone read this book once or twice, it provides a comprehensive, well written tutorial on one of the most basic (and often overlooked) tools at your disposal. Even Windows users could install Cygwin and gain the benefit of a good POSIX compliant shell and this book. It also has the advantage that once purchased it will be useful for many, many years to come - the language has not changed noticeably in twenty five years and should not change in another twenty five.

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Solaris	Korn Shell 93	ksh88 and posix shell	Bourne Shell	C/Tcsh	Bash	Perl	Etc

Softpanorama Bookshelf: Best Shell Books Reviews

Old News ;-)

***** Bash Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for bash Users

Good book that covers bash 3.2.

This is slightly obsolete book contains reasonably good description of the shell as a language. Examples are the weak part and you probably need a Bash Cookbook in addition to that book.

This might be a great second book on shell scripting. Can serve as a valuable add on to "Learning Korn shell" from O'Reilly -- also a very strong book on shell scripting.

***** Unix Shell Programming, Third Edition

This is a very solid introductory book from the authors that were in the field for more then 20 years. The first edition was published in 1985 I still have it. It looks like a Guinness record for a computer book: twenty years in print ;-)

Althouth the content is rock solid this this is still Born shell so it's OK only as an introduction, when both Bash and ksh93 have a disadvantage of being too complex and fat

**+ Linux Shell Scripting with Bash

This is an average or below average book on bash. But like in many books of Linux wanna-bees errors are rampant and understanding of shell is lacking. Here is one glaring example of both author oversight and editor neglect ( page 22):

"The tilde (~) represents you current directory.

.... Although .. and .. work with all Linux programs, ~ and - are features of Bash and only work with Bash and Bash scripts.

I wonder since when "The tilde (~) represents you current directory". And since when "~ and - are features of Bash and only work with Bash and Bash scripts. "

*** Books Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting

This book should probably be called "Shell by example" but this title was already taken. It looks like it is slightly AIX biased but many scripts are multiplatform and take into account all major enterprise flavors of Unix including Solaris, HP-UX and Linux.

The book deals with POSIX shell not ksh93 as previous reviewer assumed (for example Solaris the default shell is POSIX shell and ksh93 is available only as dtksh, the Desktop KornShell)

The books starts with very brief, badly written and superficial reference of shell, that should probably be published as an Appendix.

The other 24 chapters demonstrate "shell by example" approach: each is devoted to one useful, semi-useful or completely useless example.

Chapter 2 is amusing. The author shows 12 ways of piping the file into the while loop. Half of them completely useless and added just to impress the reader. Moreover the author seems does not understand that

cat $FILENAME | while LINE=`line`

and

cat $FILENAME | while LINE=$(line)

are absolutely identical :-)

Chapter 3 is semi-useful and is devoted to programming of various type of progress indicators in shell. All example are pretty straightforward.

Chapter 4 is devoted to monitoring filesystem space. For an intermediate book it's sad that the author definitely does not understand that he need to use AWK or Perl here.

Chapter 5 is good and shows simple and useful swap space monitoring framework.

Chapter 7 contains very questionable approach to a trivial problem. Instead of parsing uptime string with AWK or Perl from the right the author split hears about variations of time formats used in the command.

Chapter 8 demonstrates co-routine approach to solving a problem and that's probably the most interesting example that I have found. But the code in Listing 8.9 to long and can benefit form refactoring.

Chapter 10 is useless other then example of some shell constructs and the author does not demonstrate deep understanding of the issues involved with security of passwords in general and with the randomization of passwords in particular.

Chapter 11 is AIX specific.

Chapters 12 and 13 are pretty useful, but in both cases there are better approaches and they can benefit from Webliography inclusion (the author actually pretty much ignore the fact of existence of Internet including various free code databases like freshmeat).

All-in-all the book is a mixed bag. Examples are OK as shell programming demonstrations but they fall short of demonstrating the mastery of both ksh and UNIX tools involved.

***+ Learning the Korn Shell (2nd Edition)

**** Korn Shell, The: Linux and Unix Shell Programming Manual by Anatole Olczak. Paperback

*** Unix Shell Programming Tools (Unix Tools)

*** A Practical Guide to Linux(R) Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming

***+ Unix Shells by Example

*** Linux Shells by Example (with CD-ROM)

*** UNIX Shell Programmer's Interactive Workbook

***+ Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours Series)

**** Learning the Korn Shell (A Nutshell Handbook)

*** Learning the Korn Shell (2nd Edition)

*** Books Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting

***+ Hands-On KornShell 93 Programming -- no e-text

**** Unix Shell Programming (Hayden Books Unix System Library)

**** The New Kornshell : Command and Programming Language

**** Learning the Korn Shell (A Nutshell Handbook)

**** Unix Shell Programmer's Interactive Workbook (Unix Interactive Workbook Series)

***+ Unix Shell Programming

?? Unix Shell Objects

****+ Learning the Bash Shell

***** Portable Shell Programming : An Extensive Collection of Bourne Shell Examples (Hewlett-Packard Professional Books)

Softpanorama Bookshelf:
Best Shell Books Reviews

**** Korn Shell, The: Linux and Unix Shell Programming Manual
by Anatole Olczak. Paperback

*+ Unix Shells by Example**

*+ Hands-On KornShell 93 Programming** -- no e-text