Customer Reviews

From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line

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The command line was introduced with the first interactive computers, Whereas GUIs are pretty and convenient for many tasks, power users know that only a command line lets you tell a computer exactly what to do. "From Bash to Z Shell" wants to let everybody in on this secret, and it meets its goal admirably.

"From Bash to Z Shell" assumes little about the reader's experience with computers. The first few chapters introduce the concept of a command shell and something of the UNIX philosophy. Don't worry, though, because examples throughout the book show bash and zsh running on Windows. These first few chapters look at the C shell as well as the eponymous shells.

The middle chapters each explore a single important concept like command editing, completion, pattern matching, redirection, and process management. Special features of bash and zsh are introduced in context. I can't stress enough how useful these chapters are: the manual pages for these shells are large but still terse and cryptic. This book manages to provide a conceptual framework into which all of its useful tidbits can be organized and absorbed.

The last few chapters look at scripting: both full blown programs and smaller chunks of shell-customization code. Again, the material here is invaluable: you're not going to get it from the manual pages!

If you work on UNIX systems, or if you'd like to make your Windows environment vastly more powerful, you need this book. I strongly recommend it.

This book walks through various aspects of how to use Bash and zsh to do powerful things, with something of a focus on how to configure them. (Thus, you're learning to make your shell environment even more powerful!)

It walks through, in parallel, the way to configure the two shells. I didn't expect this to be useful; I expected that I'd prefer to have more zsh material, and skip the Bashing. It turns out, however, that, in many cases, their parallel development has led to strong parallels in functionality. This is useful because, well, I don't get to install zsh everywhere that I might like to :-).

Somewhat surprisingly, the book waits until right near the end to present the notions of control structures and writing functions. The last two chapters are quite the culmination of the effort; one on functions provides a presentation of script option parsing better than I have seen anywhere; absolutely excellent.

The final chapter, on writing zsh command completion extensions, is similarly wonderful. The reference and online documents are fairly opaque without having a good overview of what you're trying to accomplish. The book provides that overview...

I've just finished reading From Bash to Z Shell from APress Publishing. It's taught this Linux NetAdmin several new tricks, and should be an addition to any Admin's bookshelf. It'll fit nicely next to your O'Reilly's.

I initially bought the book to lean the Z Shell (zsh), but decided that I'll stick with good 'ole Bash for a little longer. The tricks I've learned through this book about Bash quenches my needs for the moment. This book teaches you about essential techniques such as CDPATH, History options, key bindings, editing modes, and tons more. I've only read it only once, but I have already dog-eared 20 pages. My ~/.bashrc, and ~/.inputrc are in full swing with many new shortcuts! I highly recommend this book!!

I work on multiple Unix platforms all day long. I had never really taken the time to learn about the shells, but I had picked up the basics over time. I knew how to run commands, string them together with pipes, and redirect their output into files. So when I tell you that I started learning new things in the first chapter of From Bash to Z Shell, you will know the coverage is in depth. If you are a casual shell user, or even less experienced, this book has a lot to offer you.

From Bash to Z Shell is organized into three parts. Part one is an introduction to shell basics. It focuses on typical interactions with a shell including all of the things I mentioned knowing before reading this book. There is surprisingly good depth even here though and I doubt that anyone short of a power user could make it through this section without picking up a new trick or two. I learned multiple things from each chapter in this section.

In part two, each chapter takes a single aspect of the shells and really focuses in on just that. You will find chapters about the startup files each shell invokes as well as shell command histories. This is comprehensive coverage that really gets you to understand how things work as well as how to tune them to your personal tastes. You are even less likely to not pickup great tips in here.

The third and final part of the book turns to shell programming. While I suspect that plenty of users interact with a shell regularly without getting much into scripting them, there are still useful tidbits in here for them too. For example, after reading this section, I added some code to my startup file to customize my shell's completion functionality. I can now tab-complete the server names used by my workplace and even file system paths on those servers. This section also has a very good chapter on variables that will definitely help in day to day usage. A couple of the final chapters in here are heavily slanted towards or exclusively about the Z Shell though, so those chapters don't hold much for users of other shells.

As the title suggests, the book extensively covers both the Bash shell, which seems to be the standard default on many Unix systems now, and the feature-rich Z Shell that power users seem to favor. Surprisingly though, the book does talk about many other shells. In the first part especially, features tend to be described for more than just the two shells with top billing. This falls off in the later parts to some extent though. Also, the authors clearly aren't fans of the C Shell or its derivative the T C-Shell, so fans of those will want to look elsewhere. Windows receives some screen time, but only from the angle of running Unix-like environments and shells on it. You won't find coverage of the native Windows shells in these pages.

The book is quite good at covering the similarities of the shells. They frequently tell you when some command will work unchanged in both Bash and the Z Shell and they always do their best to give two equivalent commands when there are differences. This makes the shell knowledge you pick up from reading quite portable. It's also nice for those who don't know much about the differences between the shells and thus are trying to learn enough to pick the right one for them. It helped me choose a favorite. The only downside of this is that the transitions seem to become less smooth late in the book and I found myself wondering if we were still talking about Bash or had moved on to Z Shell a few times. This is a minor complaint though.

Beyond covering the shells well, the book can also help you better understand the design of the Unix operating system. It has some great asides on things like process forking and child process inheritance, special files and devices, and terminal drivers. Seeing these items through their interactions with a shell can make them significantly easier to grasp.

The writing style of this book is very natural. That's important since it distills so much information into every page, you could easily begin to feel overwhelmed. Luckily, that wasn't the case at all for me. I found the material to be presented so naturally that I absorbed it with ease. The book also has abundant cross references and a strong index which will make it great to reference later.

The final measure of a book like this turns out to be how much it changed your daily work habits. I've already noticed dramatic differences. I'm using shell loops at the command-line now to process many files at once; I actually understand shell quoting and when to use which types of quotes and escapes to get the desired effect; I can easily strip off a file extension or get a directory name from a full path when I need one; I make constant use of the command history now whether I'm searching for a past command, correcting a typo, or just pulling a single argument out of a previous command for reuse in a new command; and I've written a few shell functions to provide shortcuts to my common tasks. I just naturally began doing these things too, I didn't have to work at it a lot. From Bash to Z Shell just raised my understanding that much. To me, that's a big selling point.

Novice users and power users of *nix will enjoy reading <cite>From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command line</cite> by Oliver Kiddle, Jerry Peek, and Peter Stephenson. In this moderately-size book from Apress, the authors delve into both bash (Bourne Again Shell) and zsh (Z Shell) to enable you to utilize them to their fullest advantage. Topics range from the simple editing of the command line to redefining key sequences, down into creating functions for editing and command line completion. Some areas are covered in other books, but this one goes into some side streets and alleyways to show you the shortcuts to more efficient use of the shell.
A *nix style shell is available in a number of platforms, so the authors chose not to limit themselves to just one, such as Linux. The techniques they discuss can be used in Unix, as well as under Windows using cygwin.
In case you're not overly well-versed in shell handling, the first part of the book does a pretty good job covering all of the things a typical user might want to do. Basic command editing, I/O redirection, jobs, processes, and some simple scripting are all covered. For many users, this is as far as they would like to go. However, reading a little further yields treasure.
The next part delves into bash version 3.0 and zsh version 4.2. A good chunk of chapter 4 is spent on sophisticated command line editing techniques, including rebinding keys with bindkey (or its bash cousin 'bind'). The next few chapters cover common topics of prompt strings, file/directory globbing, and shell history. Then, significant press is given to the subject of pattern matching, which <cite>From Bash to Z Shell</cite> details with many examples from both bash and zsh. Part 2 wraps up by discussing command line and file/directory name completion, and job processing.
The third and final part of the book deals with extending the shell using variables, scripts, and functions. The first two chapters go over familiar territory: shell variables and shell programming. The last two chapters focus on topics frequently overlooked: editor functions, and completion functions. This is where a true power user can shine, creating a suite of new functions to speed his/her use of zsh or bash.
All-in-all, <cite>From Bash to Z Shell</cite> provides a frequent shell user with a plethora of new insights into customizing the bash and zsh shell programs to fit his/her tastes. The authors have filled a void in tackling the subject of customizing the shell rather than just simply using it. I would have liked to see more coverage of some of the more standard uses of the shells, just so the book could be a more complete reference, rather than the specialized one it is. Specialized or not, there is a lot offered here, and you couldn't go wrong getting this book.

I bought this book for two reasons: To get a quick view of the Z shell, which was excellent, and to complement the many books on Bash that I have. This is where it really shone. I found information here, and quickly, that I could not find elsewhere. I would recommend it for all Bash programmers. This comes from a Korn shell bigot, too.

This is an excellent book, even though like a lot of folks, I bought it for the wrong reason. This book isn't really specific to the title, it's actually about the subtitle. Bash and Zsh are major characters, but this book is about using and mastering the command line, in either UNIX or Linux.

I don't know why the authors would target a book at me personally, so I assume there are many others out there who were once masters of the DOS and UNIX command lines when their companies made the decision (sometimes regretfully) to move "up" to Windows and Windows NT. Now here I am, over a decade later fondly recalling the power and well, frankly the fun, of being able to control my computer and the OS that runs it with commands customized specifically to my needs.

If you miss DOS batch files and UNIX scripts, being able to automate functions that take dozens of repetitive steps in a GUI like Windows or CDE, then this book was written for you as well. The free, powerful open source UNIX-based Operating Systems like Solaris and FreeBSD or the many Linux versions have given the command line it's well-deserved comeback. The authors of "BASH to Z Shell, Conquering the Command Line," make the assumption that the reader has more than basic computer skills, but just in case, starts with the premise that we may have even forgotten why the command line is even desirable.

Each of the early chapters on the basics warns the reader of the level of coverage and explains where to go to find the in depth version. I remembered pipes and redirection, but read the early stuff anyway and was rewarded with the fun reminder of just how powerful the command line can be. How about one command that can list every program on your system, sort it alphabetically, trim off any text and blank spaces you don't want and print it all in nice neat columns either onscreen or to a file? Ok, so nobody really needs such a list, but ya gotta admit it's pretty cool to be able to do all that with a single command. Then they launch into a discussion of for and foreach loops -- that's the basic stuff at the beginning mind you.

This is a book that's destined to be dog-eared. The spine will be wrinkled from sitting on the desk next to my keyboard as I construct a list of aliases that will simplify my life and then build a menu so I can remember them all. If you're just getting back into UNIX or have newly discovered Linux, this could be an invaluable tool for the journey.

When it comes to dealing with the various Linux shells most Linux books devote a single chapter or so to the subject. While this book does cover most of the command line information you need to use a Linux system, its best feature is the extensive coverage of shell scripting and other subjects that generally receive minimal treatment in most Linux books. The authors list internal shell commands and how they are used as well as working with the shell history file. It ends with a section on extending the functionality of the shell based on the items learned in the first two sections. Shell coverage is excellent for the bash and the z-shell and pretty much non-existent for others like the c-shell, t-shell and Korn shell. From Bash to Z-Shell: Conquering the Command Line is one of the best books I've read on the bash and z-shell and is highly recommended to anyone learning to work with either of these two of the most popular of all Linux shells.

Before today's fancy GUIs of every operating system, programmers and sysadmins were restricted to command line programs; totally lacking any UI. Some of you who remember that will have a frisson of retroness about this book.

It concentrates on only 2 shells - bash and zsh, though it does mention briefly other shells, in passing. If you're new to all this, it's a good way to appreciate what you can do outside a GUI. The book's examples are short and simple. None are even remotely 100 lines in length. A quick style of programming that will appeal to some of you. Because you can pragmatically solve certain classes of problems with simple interactions with the operating system.

The book also shows that scripting occupies a middle ground between what sysadmins and programmers do. In this way, you can use the book as an unorthodox career guide. If you are a sysadmin and you find writing scripts enjoyable, it could suggest you try programming in fully fledged languages like C. Conversely, if you are a programmer in one of the latter languages, but you find scripting more fun, perhaps you should be a sysadmin.

This book is a must for any sysadmin or power user. It is definitely not for the novice. It's writing structure is almost akin to what it would be like if you could read pthreads! I am so happy with this book.