Customer Reviews

Beginning Shell Scripting (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The claims that the author gives equal scripting time to each OS and all shells is very misleading.
The author hates Windows and never misses a chance to let you know this - I wish the author had left the personal views and OS politics out ...
or just not covered Windows at all. (Which by the way isn't covered at all - other than the Cygwin program and why the author hates Windows so much.)

This book uses the BASH shell almost exclusively with some "oh yea, this syntax won't work on the C Shell" thrown in.
the Korn & Z Shells are treated like they don't even exist - and BASH is always the only way to go.

The book at about Chapter 3 becomes more of a "look what i can do" and "here write this out in a text editor and save the file as this", without much explaInation as to why it happens that way and what the syntax introduced means. With some syntax being introduced in a script and never being explained or referenced at all.

The terms the Author uses are as technical as you can get (like Palindromic Scripting" instead of saying a number reads the same forward and backwards (ex. 15851) or even symmetrical would have been a better term for a newbie. Luckily i know what Palindromic numbers are.

Not a good book for Newbies ... too much un-explained out of nowhere syntax - related in the most technical terms the Author could find. It reads more like a technical manual on something ... not a how to learn from the ground up book. Your just as well off reading the MAN pages.

This book seems to want to introduce all and everything under the sun, as as such, the book looses focus quite a bit. For example, the in the beginning the author introduces samples of python, perl, and tcl, talks about batch, and then introduces a variety of text editors for all platforms. Later in the next chapter, we learn how to launch a music player and then echo out text, and then how to setup variable in bourne shell, and the c shell. I am grateful for his enthusiasm on the topic, but feels like I'm on a roller coaster ride of scrambled ideas related to shell scripting.

In looking forward to the chapter "Scripting with Files", I see some minor notes on chmod and file test conditionals for files. I don't see more advance topics like using find or stat or related topics, and instead we are presented with a conversation on Next file systems, Mac OS X file systems (UFS and HFS+). And on those topics, we get "gee that's neat to know" trivia, but it's totally useless, as there nothing on Mac specific commands like ditto or setfile to handle the Mac flavor of Unix.

On one topic on "Controlling Processes", the author explains the concept of processes and shows a screen shot of a Windows Task Manager. I was thinking, that well, maybe this book offers something different by showing how to script with Windows specific commands, like tasklist, but nope, we only get the screen shot, and following discussion on ps command and the /proc directory on Linux.

Overall, the book offers a lot of trivia on a variety of topics, and in some places there may be some scripts -- if you are lucky -- relating to the topic, and interspersed chaotically is some introduction material on shell scripting, sometimes bourne, sometimes c shell, sometimes something different. If this type of style works for you, then this might be the book, but I think for most of us, we'll want to follow more focused organized books relating to shell scripting (and of a particular scripting language, e.g. POSIX shell or other shell language).

Shell scripting is one of those things I keep telling myself I need to learn but never quite get around to it. The Wrox book Beginning Shell Scripting by Eric Foster-Johnson, John C. Welsh, and Micah Anderson might be the book I end up using to get me there.

Chapter List: Introducing Shells; Introducing Shell Scripts; Controlling How Scripts Run; Interacting With The Environment; Scripting With Files; Processing Text with sed; Processing Text with awk; Creating Command Pipelines; Controlling Processes; Shell Scripting Functions; Debugging Shell Scripts; Graphing Data With MRTG; Scripting For Administrators; Scripting For The Desktop; Answers To Exercises; Useful Commands; Index

This book has something for just about every beginning user. As a "Beginning" Wrox book, it's meant to take you from no knowledge to basic competency. Normally when you think of shell scripts, you think Unix. But this book goes beyond that. The authors include just about every OS in their coverage. Unix and Linux users are obviously taken care of, as I'd expect. But they also address Mac OS X users so that they can start to delve under the covers of their operating system. They even include Windows users by having them download the Cygwin software. Overall, the focus is on the Bourne shell, but special features of the others (like C, bash, and Korn) are also addressed as they come up. Overall, you get coverage on just about everything you could want as a beginner.

With the combination of "Try It Out" and "How It Works" examples in the book, beginners should quickly be able to do something with their new knowledge. To me, that's always the sign of a good beginning level book on a subject... get the reader doing something productive quickly. Beginning Shell Scripting meets that criteria.

This is a book for the IT professionals with good knowledge in Shell Scripting. It does not provide enough explanation about the Shell scripting to help beginners. The book is just for the BASH scripting, and the author's approach is not systematic. Therfore, this book is not good to use for the educational purpose.

I recommend this book to those who know the Shell Scripting, but they are looking for some new ideas or second opinion.

It is nice , useful book. I found it to be the nice match to the Linux and UNIX for a beginner training suite, 4DVDs + 2CDs includes 4 Unix Academy Certifications ed.2008. They supplement one another very nicely and helpfully.
It is easy to read and follow, the examples are clear and well described. Overall very nice effort!

assuming that you're focused on using BASH and you're not trying to push the limits of shell scripting, this is a great book. perhaps I'm just lucky, but all the things i've needed to know to get a quick-dirty solution is in this text. plus, the book seems to give useful examples.

This book is great for shell beginners. I got it with the hopes that it would teach from the ground up and it does that without losing the reader. It starts with a good history of *nix and lets you choose what shell to use. It teaches all the basic shell commands and gives the reader a good knowledge of the underlying *nix core. I recommend this book to any beginner interested in shell programming.

It's rather hard to "shell script Windows" without some form of third party add-on. The base Windows command line, as it currently stands, is ill-suited to anything but the most basic of commands, and kicking off WMI scripts, whereas pretty much any Unix system comes standard with a full suite of scripting tools and shells.

This should be changing with Monad in Windows Vista, but for right now, shell scripting in Windows without third party tools is just not going to compare to what you can do with Unix.