Customer Reviews

Unix Power Tools, Third Edition

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A Good Big Book - but worth the hype?

The Unix Power Tools has already established a reputation of being a classic. The behemoth has no less that 1073 pages and goes accompanied by a CD with a lot of small shellscripts that are described in the book. The authors show a thorough understanding of the subject and are able to explain the ways of Unix in a casual talkative way. Much work is devoted to the layout and the text edition. For example, the crossreferences are well done, greyed out in readable italics. The publisher seems to understand the importance of easy readable text. Many of us know how a good book can be spoiled by hasty and bad editing, and it's a relief to see that O'Reilly takes this issue seriously. The text is divided into paragraphs of about 1/4 to 1 page in size. These paragraphs deal with the Unix commands, the shells, the history of unix or the included nifty shellscripts. One might think that the authors view Unix as a collection of structured trivia - a view I personally like. You won't read this book `cover to cover' (to use that awful cliche), but you'll start joyreading for that bit of advice or for that handy tool they've written. (For example: the thing that got me up the wall was that filenames can have empty spaces at the end, so it seems you cannot delete them. I should have known that one way earlier :^( ) Sometimes the authors write down some very casual paragraphs: a flame from usenet (Why NOT to use the C-shell for programming), the history of a command ( grep is: g from global, RE is regular expression, and the P stands for print, hence g/RE/P) or other fun to read items. It will not be the book you'll grab for serious studying or when the system goes down unexpectedly. The problems with big books are usually twofold and this one suffers rather badly from it. First of all it is written for the novice and expert alike - a concept that comes from a marketing and not from educational point of view. The authors repeat the man pages - did you know you can find files by name with the `find' command? And they go on for every Find option. The novice who didn't know about the find command will not try anything as fancy like to build a database with the filestructure in it in order to speed up his find command. Equally, experts won't like the basics explained. The second problem with big books is that lots of the presented material is not relevant to your need or situation. You haven't got the C-shell? Throw away a couple of pages. Don't like the chapter ` vi tips & tricks' , `Saving time at the commandline' or `creating custom commands in vi', then you can skip another 100 pages. Conclusion. Although lot's of information isn't relevant to your need, unix-implementation, shell or skill-level, this book is easy to read thanks to the good layout and small paragraphs. The authors truly have years of experience and have made many handy shellscripts. For those of you who want to like to master the commandline of Unix and like to skim for the golden hint, this book is a true find. But if you know what you want to learn then dedicated books present a better alternative to this somewhat unfocussed book.

I do not know about you, but for me, a book has to be pretty darn exceptional to persuade me to buy a second edition of a book which I already own the first. Unix Power Tools is one such book. It is simply packed with tons of useful tips which the authors have accumulated over decades of using Unix, and is a sort of `crème de la crème' of O'Reilly reference books.

Praise aside, the book is not for everyone. It is an intermediate level reference, not an introductory tutorial. If your problems are like "How do I delete a file?", you should read something else first, get acquainted with Unix, and then return to it. If, however, the questions you face are more like "How do I delete a file with a null name?", then this is exactly the book for you. Unless there is a real Unix wizard around you, this book is likely to earn you this title in your environment.

The second edition focuses on POSIX systems rather than on SysV/BSD, uses Bash and Tcsh instead of Sh, Ksh and Csh, and has moved from Awk to Perl. The two-colour printing is gone, though. Fortunately, the superb index - one of the best I have seen - is still here, and so are the cross-references in the text. Accompanying CD-ROM might be essential if you are living in the mountains of Tajikistan, but anybody connected to the Internet will probably prefer to download newer versions of software on-line.

For the last several months I have been dealing with a Unix/Linux environmnet. I had no prior experience with Linux or Unix. However, I have to document and explain scripts, modules, and such every day as part of my work.

This is the first book that has given me bite-sized, useful information in an explanatory format that doesn't waste my time. Whereas O'Reilly's Running Linux helped me very little after a nearly-full read-through, Unix Power Tools has taught me something every time I pick it up. What's more, the chapters are small (and intriguing) enough that a flip-through during a bathroom break can send me back to the keyboard to try something new.

It's like an encyclopedia and your friend the SA in one. Get this and Essential System Administration and you cover the practical needs and the complex activities (respectively) of working in Unix-like-environments in two volumes.

As another reviewer said, this isn't an "Intro to Unix" book. But if you have a Unix or Linux account, and have learned some basics but want to make the operating system really work for you, this is your book. That's how I started; I spent a month with this book, and emerged a power user, chaining commands and writing shell scripts to bend the operating system to my will. Until I read this book, I had no idea how much editing, filtering, searching, file and directory manipulation, automation and time saving I could achieve in Unix. I've been a fan of Unix ever since, and Unix Power Tools is still my first reference.

My only criticism of this book is that it covers so many topics that it can't treat many of them in any depth. If you want to know about sh, awk, grep, or sed, you can get an introduction here, but will need the man pages or other more specific books to learn more. But I still find about 90% of what I need to know about all of these things in Unix Power Tools.

I have the first edition, which now seems a bit dated, though still fundamentally sound. I don't know what changes have been made in the 2nd edition.

This is one of those books which I refer to often. Whether it is that thing about shell variables or just for finding some obscure command. It is a book which will go well with an expert as well a beginner trying to find her way around. The website has an awesome collection of tools which can be added easily to one's toolkit. What I like the most about this book is that it has covered all the popular flavors of UNIX so it will make a permanent place on the desk for itself. The chapters on security and internet access, groups a lot of commands and information making it very easy to use and find. Even though I was using UNIX for years and thought of myself as an advanced user, a power user if you may. I found this book humbling and learned at least three different ways of doing the same task.
Niloufer Tamboly, CISSP

This is one of the best technical book that I bought in the last 10 years, at least from the organizational and layout point of the view. It contains hundreds of short articles, page or two in length organized in a remarkable way of cross-referenced, alamanc-like book.

Articles are logically organized in chapters so you can read the book from cover to cover if you wish. However more likely you'll end up reading the book more randomly, following the cross-references. (I have some bad experience with the books organized in this way but this one is a clear exception.)

The book is written for beginners and experts alike, since I'm a Unix newbie I can only confirm that; I hate to say but the life of Unix SA would be much easier if the man pages would be organized in a similar way -- including examples that're almost never there.

I'm waiting for O'Reilly to update their "Unix CD Bookshelf" with third edition of this book because it's a little too heavy for carrying it with me.

A friend of mine recommended this book for me a couple of years ago and it took me a while to find it in the book stores. After finding and reading it I was absolutely amazed! Very full of information and tips, easy to understand and written with humor as well.

I have about a dozen of those Post-It flags in my book to mark the several sections that I am currently reading. The design and cross-referencing is excellent! I have yet to see a book as well-constructed as this one.

Here is a quote taken from _Unix_Power_Tools_ which demonstrates the
attitude, shared by the authors, that unix allows you to make things
easier. "''Ugh!', you say, 'that's just what I hate about UNIX. All
these long filenames and options I can't remember. Who wants to type
all that stuff!' Precisely. That's why UNIX makes it so easy to
create custom commands, in the form of aliases and shell scripts."

Unix Power Tools is true to the spirit and philosophy of unix in
focusing on the command line environment with its rich abundance of
command interpreters, shell languages, system utilities, commands, and
the like. This is the realm of real power.

The book is aimed squarely at the user who wants to learn what's under
the hood of the unix (and Linux) system. It's not about how to change
your wallpaper or install the latest media player, or configure your
desktop, although this new edition may touch on these topics, too.
It's really about using unix to greatest advantage, about tapping its
real power, the power of its simplicity, of its flexibility, of
tapping into I/O streams, and using the tool-box approach to solving
real problems. It's about using 'pipes', 'redirection', and
'filters', to automate the big jobs.

My copy of this book is tattered from all the use it's had over the
last ten years. I'm always hunting it down, as my associates at work
are constantly borrowing it to help them solve a problem. That's
okay, though. I am ordering another copy, just for me. I'm curious
to see this new edition, which I understand has broader coverage of
the various unix flavors, including Linux, which I run
at home.

I would recommend this book to those who find unix intimidating, as
well as to the unix enthusiast. For anyone who ever wondered what the
fuss over unix was about, this book will certainly bring on an
epiphany. For between these covers is the greatest accumulation of
unix wisdom and know-how to be found in any book. The shear volume is
enough to elicit awe. But that's only part of its value, because such
an enormous accumulation of material might normally overwhelm the
reader, leaving him frustrated and unenlightened. Happily, this book
is so well organized, and the material so pleasingly presented, that
anyone will find it a pleasure to browse through and to mine
repeatedly for those precious tips, tricks, and methods that make
using unix so rewarding.

This is admittedly a pound heavy volume, and might be expected to
contain a lot of chaff with the grain. I have not found it so. The
authors have chosen the material well, and know their subject so
intimately and thoroughly, that I am left with a feeling of profound
respect. This is, in short, a book that is worthy of its subject; a
truly great book for a great OS.

I read another reviewer who avers this is the one book he would take
with him to a deserted island. I concur. It has taught me more than
any other unix book, and has made my work more efficient, and most
importantly, more interesting. I paid full retail for my copy of
Power Tools, and at the time, I thought it was a lot, but it has
repaid me many times over. It's the most indispensable unix book on
my shelf; a real gem.

I'm an analog IC designer moonlighting as a linux hacker (I'm actually addicted). I try to build software, write shell scripts and customize my desktop to death. I picked up this book a year or two back and I think I've probably used it almost every single day to look up something or the other. I probably own about 20 linux related books (more than my engineering books) but this is the one that I would run out with when the firealarm sounds. Here is my short summary of my feelings about this book.
- this book (primarily) caters to intermediate to advanced users
- I would still recommend this for linux beginners as a reference to check up when every other beginner book fails. There are introductory chapters on shell scripting which could put some of the dedicated shell scripting books to shame
- One of the fundamental holy grail that linux books try to achieve (and in which they often fail) is to find a good balance between breadth and depth - both qualities which the subject of Unix do not shy away from. So a Linux beginner picks up an introductory book which addresses just one linux issue and before he knows it-he has gathered enough knowledge and the book just picks up dust. Or he could pick up a book that claims to be a reference and skims over all the items with little depth and boom when he really needs information about a particular topic he finds that the book is too shallow. The "Unix Power Tools" book, I'm happy to say achieves this good balance between depth and breadth in very good measure. Ex. When I was confused about the intricacies of bash quoting or I/O redirecition, this book came to my rescue. The Unix command "find" which was buried under a 4-year old alias for me owing to it's complexities, suddenly developed a fascination for me after I discovered it's myriad use and value from the multiple pages that this book devoted to it's demystifcation.
- I bought the O'Reilly books - "Linux in a Nutshell" and "Essential system Administration" with the purpose of using them as references - The first one was just too shallow for my requirements and taste and I use it basically as a replacement for online man pages. The second one has it's very niche, but only in specific circumstances. So they have been put to use probably just 1/10th of what the "Power Tools" book has been put to
- I'm not a guy who is driven to write reviews i.e unless I am totally ecstatic or totally disgusted with a product and you probably have guessed where I stand with this one. I waited 1 or two years and I somehow felt that I owe this review to this book.

This is a useful book and contains a huge number of insightful nuggets of information presented in the format of short articles. I found references to things I had never even dreamed of existing in Unix. However, I find that the "nugget" approach is not as useful as a coordinated text would have been, because some things are covered several times, while other things are only mentioned in passing. This book would probably be most useful to a system administrator or user as an adjunct to another reference text. The typesetting could also have been improved, as there are some references in a very pale grey font which I find unnecessarily hard to read, expecially in dim light.