Customer Reviews

Mastering Unix Shell Scripting: Bash, Bourne, and Korn Shell Scripting for Programmers, System Administrators, and UNIX Gurus

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are interested in Bourne or Bash shell programming, be aware that this book focuses exclusively on the Korn shell (ksh or "ksh93"). The Korn shell is a superset of the Bourne shell, but if you want to write scripts for sh (Bourne) or bash, another book might be more appropriate.

The breadth of real-world examples make the difference between this book and most reference texts. It's true that it's written for korn, but I've had little trouble adapting for Bash; many of the scripts run almost unchanged and the ones that don't provide a useful opportunity for exercise in adaptation. The authors prose is clear. His attitude is a bit challenging; he says early on that that his intention is to teach you how to -solve problems- by shell scripting, NOT to present a ream of canned solutions. This is NOT a reference text for any particular shell, you'll still need plenty of O'Reilly books, a web browser & etc.

This book has enabled me to write a major project using scripting as the glue to hold together a hefty mass of file-moving daemons, fax/paging engines, python UI code, PostGreSQL database engine, networking/email, SSH, and Expect scripts on a Gnu Linux platform. I absolutely could not have done it without this book and I'm very grateful to Mr Michael for his work. If a later edition could more closely serve the needs of the masses by presenting more Bash examples and maybe throwing in a CD it would be a 5-star text.

Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting is a must for all Unix Administrator. The beauty of this book is it teaches shell script with practical examples which are required in day to day life of a System Admin. Unlike many shell scripting book it just not talks about syntax but also explains whats happening behind the curtain.
Inspite of all praises the reason for giving 4 stars is due to the fact that its not meant for beginners. For serious shell script writers this book deserve 5 star rating

This is one of the best books on Unix shell scripting I have ever read. I immediately put a few of the scripts to work in our Solaris production environment. Be warned though; this book focuses entirely on the Korn shell. If you plan to write scripts using the Bourne, BASH, or C-shell you should find another book.

We wanted to automate a couple of tasks at the Unix level.
So I went looking for a Unix Shell script book. This books covers learning by doing. Real Life examples can be used and are not of the "Hello World" type. By covering on skill at a time and building on the previous skill you can learn how to shell script quickly

This is not a greatest book for learning Shell Scripting. This book does not cover regular expressions in detail even though regular expression is the heart to learning shell scripting. It could be a good book for users already familiar with Shell scripting and want to learn advance techniques in administering their application or the UNIX system. I will definitely not recommend this for users that are looking to learn and understand Shell scripting.

[A review of the 2ND EDITION, where the latter was published in June 2008.]

Perhaps you are a programmer or sysadmin of a heterogeneous network of unix and linux machines. Where the unixes hail from different vendors. Think Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and the Macintosh. (Yes, the Mac runs a descendent of Mach, which is a dialect of unix.) And maybe the linux boxes have different distros. This book spans the gamut of most unixes (I include linux in this). Helping you easily write shell scripts, without taking sides over which unix or linux version is better.

The second ecumenical aspect is that it also avoids favouring any of the 3 major unix shells - Borne, Korn and bash. In some newsgroups, there has been a tedious and interminable debate about the relative virtues of these shells. While one shell might indeed be better than others for a given task, in general they have equivalent functionality. The book's evenhanded approach is one worth emulating.

Thoughtfully, the book suggests topics that might be typically useful to sysadmins, and others more suited to programmers. It is not a strict divide. But for sysadmins, you can see discussions about how to monitor disk partitions, or system load and swap space usage. These are often issues germane to your duties.

The bulk of the book is more on programmer-related topics. Much. Note that the book is largely random access, unlike a science textbook for example, which is serial access from the front. In other words, with just a minimal acquaintance with basic scripting, you can dive straight into any chapter, without reading its predecessor.

I'm shell scripting pretty good. But I had to write a script for a customer to extract some drive statistics and another to hide some passwords from a log that I had no control over... I was kinda shaking over it.
However, this is a moderate to advanced book which showed me how to find what I was looking for. There aren't that many advanced books on shell scripting. It has many good real world examples. Two guys from my office bought their own. And best of all... It made me money!! Yes, It's worth your time and your money.

Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting is a good book on writing Korn shell scripts. If you need BASH or CSH or something else, get another book.

All of the examples in the book are directed towards Systems Administrators. That is not a bad thing. Too many books give you examples that have no use outside the one bit they are trying to teach you. Each example in this book has a real world function. The scripts cover Linux, HP-UX, Solaris and AIX. The examples are straight forward and have lots of useful comments and techniques.

My only complaint about the book is it lacks any real reference value. It would be nice to have a summary of language features. Even with that drawback I would recommend this book over the O'Reiely book.

Thank goodness for this book. It's a big, 3" thick book, that's more of a reference guide to do a bunch of really useful tasks. Example, you "could" start at page 1, but there's no point. Check the TOC or Appendix, pick what you want to learn, and just go directly to it.

I'm not as versed in other Unix areas as I'd like to be, thus why I got the book, but it does seem to have a good examples of what's going to work w/ one shell vs. another.

It's helped my career out in a big way. Heh, I mean, just tucking my shirt in and carrying a big 3" thick book around makes me appear smart. :-) "Dude, look at that 'Shell scripting' book, it's big, and he has his shirt tucked in today, he means business". Yeah buddy, you got that straight!

I don't think this is for beginners, like me, it doesn't "explain" a lot of what you're doing, at least in the detail that my cat-like brain needs, but hey, that's what Google's for. What it does give the beginner, is lots of questions to take else where, and I learned from those other areas. Example, I joined "unix.com's" forums because of this book, there I met a bunch of people that are so insanely smart, it's "insane", (seriously, how in the world do people know this stuff? One of the coolest websites I've been to was "nobodyisbornwithlinuxknowledge.com", or something like that). It also gives us beginners the concept behind what it's doing, therefore, you're now smart enough to ask the mighty oracle called "Google" the right question, to get the right answer.

I love this book, period, and I hate 3" books, particularly 3" books that are of a technical content. The information in this book is very valuable, moreso, it encouraged me to spread out to other areas, and it opened me up, to the open source world. Am I a scripting genius w/ this book in my hands, no, did I write 3 scripts w/in a month that is going to save my group a lot of money and man power, yes, yes yes! Did it make this lazy man's job easier, oh my yes.

... I love this book, and I'm a beginner, w/ his shirt tucked in now, (well at least Mon-Wed). :-)