Customer Reviews

Korn Shell Quick Reference Guide

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It's quite hard to find a concise reference guide for the Korn Shell nowadays, so I was eager to have a look at this one. The size of the book is perfectly well suited for being used as a quick desktop reference. The booklet is very useful to be sure. It's much easier to lookup something here than browsing through long manual pages. This is especially true if you know what you're looking for. My first attempts to find something weren't so successful. I don't really know what's wrong with the structure of the book, but it isn't structured in such an intuitive way as I would expect. After a few days of usage things get better. A definitive drawback is the complete lack of an index. If you're looking for something specific most of the time you end up thumbing through the whole thing.

The Reference Guide is quite complete. Eventually I was nearly always able to find what I was looking for and a great deal more. The complete shell script examples at the end of the book are very helpful. If you don't find something in the reference part it is at least somewhere in the examples. There aren't many of them out there, but those included are really helpful.

I now code in ksh on a daily basis. This handy little reference follows the organization of Olczak's excellent book "The Korn Shell User and Programming Manual" which I learned from. I only occasionally have to refer back to documentation and his Quick Reference Guide is just the ticket. My copy has a lot of yellow highlighter and margin notes. The previous reviewer's complaint about lack of an index is valid but since the Guide is only 44 pages it's not much of concern. Once you become a regular ksh coder you'll find the Guide indispensable. I have.

Its a useful little book. Indexing could be better.