Customer Reviews

Linux Shell Scripting with Bash

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

 

 

This book, unlike some of the other Bash books on the market, has very accessible and complete examples. It goes beyond simple explanations, but manages to start with the most basic concepts. My only complaint is that it is very text-heavy. Anyone who used Bash on a regular basis, even if they think they are advanced, will find something useful in this book - but if you are new to Bash, the text might be a little too dense. Easier to read than the man pages, and worth the effort, but it will take effort.

Overall, one of the best current books on the subject.

This is pretty comprehensive book that guides the reader on how to use Bash for a wide variety of purposes.

It is very well-motivated; each chapter introduces the area it examines with an interesting anecdote, and presents a reasonably rich set of examples of how to use Bash along with other Unix tools to solve the problem at hand.

It is not solely about Bash; it shows the use of process control tools like ps, kill, and such, text manipulation tools like grep, sort, cut, sed, and such, and version control using CVS. This is all well and proper: One of the major uses of shell scripting is to paste together other programs, and these examples support that.

Well done...

Amongst recent computer books, this is a rarity. There seems to be only 1 diagram in the entire book. No GUIs to pretty up the scene. In this sense, the book is a throwback to those texts of the 80s. Strictly command line and file I/O.

Bash under linux is shown by the book to be not that different from an earlier Bourne shell. Or even the more rudimentary C shell. The various chapters discuss such items as defining variables and thence using these to build up expressions in a script. Burtch methodically shows how to increase the complexity of your scripting.

If some of you come from an earlier unix background, and have scripted there, then the book is reassuring. It should validate that most of your expertise carries over into bash and linux. Sure, there might be some new material. But the book shows that a typical script is not that different from a unix script of 20 years ago.

...but the proofreader should be fired! Also, the author needs to stick to the topic of Bash scripting and leave out the references, intentional and unintentional, to Korn shell scripting. While I do appreciate the tips about how to write Bash scripts that are backward-compatible with the Korn shell, the author has at times began a topic about a Bash feature, then in the next paragraph suddenly and unexpectantly refers to the Korn shell, giving the impression that the feature applies to the Korn shell rather than the Bash shell. After re-reading the passage several times it becomes apparent that the author may have meant to refer to the Bash shell all along, or that the feature is applicable to the Bash shell - either way, it is never explicitly stated and occasionally leaves the reader wondering how the reference to the Korn shell is relevant to the discussion. There are also several typographic errors in both the text and the code snippets. If you have any experience writing Bash scripts, you should be able to spot the errors and make the necessary corrections with little effort. If you are new to Bash scripting, then you might have to use the trial-and-error approach to find and remove the typos.

Typographical errors aside, the author covers, or at least touches on, every major area you will need to know to write effective Bash scripts. The author guides you from the fundamentals, such as declaring scalar variables, arrays, and control logic(branching and loops), to function declaration and definition, all the way up to network and database access scripts.

Overall, the content of this book warrants adding it to your library, just be mindful of the typos. I would also recommend obtaining a copy of the free "Advanced Bash Scripting Guide", and especially the book "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts" by Dave Taylor.

I really can't recommend this book to anyone.

The author poorly defines the meaning of certain characters, makes references to topics he never covers in the book, and gives only cursory explanations of some key elements on Bash scripting. To make matters worse, several examples are missing characters or have additional characters that prevent the reader from understanding the scripts.

For example, I/O redirection gets only two pages in the entire book. I kept waiting for him to re-visit redirection in more depth, but he never did. Not only that, but one of the few I/O redirection samples has a typo that leaves the reader puzzled as to how redirection works at all. The typo is so bad that it renders the entire example incorrect.

I think this book was written by and for system administrators who need to do smaller tasks, rather than for developers who both want and need to understand the fundamentals of how Bash scripting works. After reading the entire book, all I gained was a basic Bash vocabulary. I was forced to find more comphrensive books and scripts on the topic in order to understand "how stuff works" and be proficient enough to write scripts on my own.

Nice POSIX examples. Yes, I'm nit-picking, but the cover says the book is "comprehensive" and a comprehensive book is 800 pages, not 412 pages. You might also want to consider "Bash Shell: Essential Programs for Your Survival at Work" by Larry L. Smith

In my opinion, this was a very good book.

Before the book, I had a simple understanding of Bash. (I've also worked with some other programming languages in the past.)

After reading the book and performing all the exercises, I was able to write fully understandable Bash scripts while exercising good formating and debugging routines. The author stresses these two methods and I agree, more Bash scripts should conform to his simple debugging functions and format. (Much compared to writing easily understood C code!)

IMO however, if a person is writing extensible scripts, I think another language such as C should be used. As years go on and processors get faster, who knows.

Book was easily understood here. I've found one other good book called "Programming From The Ground Up" ISBN 0975283847.

Good books are far & few, this Bash Scripting book is one of them.

As far as bugs, the book errata should cover them. Tracing bugs is a what a programmer does most of his time when when learning. ;-)

As far as the previous review concerning symbols,"[[" "]]", this seems to be which version of Bash is being used. Make sure you're using up-to-date code! (I've ran into people on many mailing lists using 5 year old versions! lol) And if I wanted to do more I/O redirection, I would probably use a lower level programming language such as C because it's faster, even Python from what I've heard. Pattern Match/Regex, is material for an entirely diff book.

I purchased the digital version of this book and my review is based on the deficiencies with that version. While I found the content of the book itself well-written and a decent tutorial on BASH scripting in a Linux environment, the digital version is practically useless.

For starters, the DRM is too restrictive. Given that the digital version costs the same as the printed edition, why are you not allowed to print sections of the book?

Second, and this is the kicker, the Adobe client for Linux cannot read the PDF due to the DRM. What good is a digital book on Linux programming if you can't read it with Linux? I've already mentioned that you can't print out sections of the book, so I was left with the options of either switching back and forth between Windows and Linux to first read a section and then try examples, or to use Cooperative Linux to run Linux concurrently with Windows. Again, given that the price of the digital edition is the same as the printed edition, I believe forcing the user to do this to get any use out of the book is ridiculous.

To sum up, not a bad book content wise. The digital edition is, however, practically useless given the DRM restrictions. Not being aware that I wouldn't be able to view the digital edition I purchased with Linux, I feel like I was ripped off.

This is one of those books that seems difficult to get through in a linear fashion at first but once you do, it becomes way more 'functional' in that you are able to jump quickly to any area you might be needing a primer in. This book definitely serves as a good point of reference book for the linux operating system in general--in concert of course, with other more specific books on the subject.

It is also an excellent book if you are looking to learn bash scripting with the goal of perhaps moving into learning other languages later on. The author introduces and sticks to a couple of very good 'best practice' fundamentals throughout which if adopted, will help you long after you finish the book. There are also great index sections towards the end which again, will serve as a great point of reference in learning other languages.

This shell script book is good. It will get you up to speed and you will start writing bash shell scripts. Indeed, there are some typos but they don't really hurt the goal of the book, which is to teach you the bash shell script on Linux platform.
Overall, I recommend this book if you want to learn the bash shell scripting language on Linux (all flavors). It will help you on your journey.