Bulletproof UNIX [Paperback]

Tim Gottleber (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0130930288 | ISBN-13: 978-0130930286 | Publication Date: September 6, 2002 | Edition: 1

Written in a personal style that guides the reader through the learning process, this stand alone tool for the learning of UNIX presents topics in the order users need to understand them logically and develop a cohesive picture of covered concepts. Professionals will enjoy a large number of illustrations showing HOW the commands work, and testing their knowledge by trying the command series to see if they get the same results. Chapter topics cover getting started; file handling in UNIX; file matching metacharacters, commands, and history; Editing 101—meet ed; Editing 102—ed's big brother ex; visual editing with vi; interesting commands; tools and concepts; process control; regular expressions and the grep sisters; types of text processing; awk; and shell scripting. For anyone who uses UNIX, and anyone who needs to become a proficient UNIX user.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The sample chapters we got from Dr. G.'s book made hard concepts like awk and shell scripting clear and fun." — T. J. Danna, a Unix student at North Lake College in Irving, TX.

"This is the greatest Unix book ever written. You will love it, I know I did." — the Author's mother.

From the Back Cover

Although Unix is not intuitive it is extremely powerful. Becoming a Unix power user takes an investment of both time and effort, but the capabilities you gain makes the effort well worth while. Because it is so powerful, the universe of possible Unix commands is vast, and knowing what is essential is hard to determine. I crafted this book because of these reasons, and because useful introductory- and mid-level Unix textbooks are difficult to find.

Together you and I will explore those parts of the Unix universe that are essential for you to become comfortable, efficient, and effective using Unix. We will start with some basic concepts and continue developing skills and abilities until we finally reach the pinnacle of shell scripting. I know you will find this book helpful, useful, and hopefully fun. Here are a few of the major areas we will investigate:

• The three most common editors
• File and directory handling commands
• The communication tools mail, pine, talk, and write
• Text processing tools like tr, grep, and sed
• The awk programming language
• Bourne shell scripting

What you hold in your hands is based on more than 15 years of helping students in both industry and college learn to become powerful Unix users. The order of presentation is arranged so that you learn the foundation skills for a command before the command itself. For example, the awk programming language is based upon sed and grep. So before we tackle awk, you will understand and be able to use both sed and grep. As your knowledge of Unix grows, you will find that it is an amazingly compelling and enjoyable tool.

Since Bulletproof Unix is a textbook, you will also find a list of key words and commands, review questions, and suggested exercises at the end of each chapter. In addition, the Companion Website has questions you can use to test your knowledge as well as sample files and example scripts so you can see and play with the same files that were used to create the book.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 766 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (September 6, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130930288
• ISBN-13: 978-0130930286
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #106,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #54 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > Unix

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars alright, February 18, 2008

By 

Jacob - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bulletproof UNIX (Paperback)

it is an alright book for learning some little things, but don't feel like i learned much from this book as i could have from another

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good book for beginners, January 20, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Bulletproof UNIX (Paperback)

Really a good book for the students who are in the beginning stage of UNIX.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good Information, Terrible Writing Style, January 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Bulletproof UNIX (Paperback)

The content of this book is good and anyone from a beginner to experienced UNIX user will learn something from reading this book. However, I can't recommend it because the author writes this book as if he is speaking to 3rd graders. The author's tone seems to assume all readers of the book are clueless and need tiresome explanations about obvious points. The book is also filled with un-funny side commentary that is intended (I guess) to make the technical material more readable-but it fails miserably.

An example of how the author goes wrong is in chapter 11, where the UNIX "grep" command is covered. The author continually refers to the "grep" command as "she." I suppose he thinks that personifying a UNIX command will somehow make the material more enjoyable to his "3rd grade readers." He couldn't be more wrong! I find this style so annoying I want rip the pages from the book and send them mercilessly through a shredder!

So, unless you like to read technical books with the words "dummy" or "idiot" in the title, I would stay away from this one. There is no shortage of excellent UNIX books out there, so there is no reason to waste time with this one.