A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming (2nd Edition) [Paperback]

Mark G. Sobell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 19, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0131367366 | ISBN-13: 978-0131367364 | Edition: 2

For use with all versions of Linux, including Ubuntu,™ Fedora,™ openSUSE,™ Red Hat,® Debian, Mandriva, Mint, and now OS X, too!

• Get more done faster, and become a true Linux guru by mastering the command line!
• Learn from hundreds of realistic, high-quality examples
• NEW! Coverage of the Mac OS X command line and its unique tools
• NEW! Expert primer on automating tasks with Perl

The Most Useful Linux Tutorial and Reference, with Hundreds of High-Quality Examples for Every Distribution–Now Covers OS X and Perl, Too!

 

To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master shells and the command line. Until now, you had to buy two books to gain that mastery: a tutorial on fundamental Linux concepts and techniques, plus a separate reference. Now, there’s a far better solution. Renowned Linux expert Mark Sobell has brought together comprehensive, insightful guidance on the tools system administrators, developers, and power users need most, and an outstanding day-to-day reference, both in the same book.

 

This book is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic: You can use it with any Linux system, now and for years to come. Use Macs, too? This new edition adds comprehensive coverage of the Mac OS X command line, including essential OS X-only tools and utilities other Linux/UNIX books ignore.

 

Packed with hundreds of high-quality, realistic examples, this book gives you Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful knowledge about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regular expressions. Sobell has also added an outstanding new primer on Perl, the most important programming tool for Linux admins seeking to automate complex, time-consuming tasks.

 

A Practical Guide to Linux® Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, Second Edition, is the only book to deliver

• Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you’ll actually need to perform
• Deeper insight, based on Sobell’s immense knowledge of every Linux and OS X nook and cranny
• A start-to-finish primer on Perl for every system administrator
• In-depth coverage of basic and advanced Linux shell programming with bash and tcsh
• Practical explanations of 100 core utilities, from aspell to xargs–including Mac OS X specific utilities from ditto to SetFile
• All-new coverage of automating remote backups with rsync
• Dozens of system security tips, including step-by-step walkthroughs of implementing secure communications using ssh and scp
• Tips and tricks for customizing the shell and using it interactively from the command line
• Complete guides to high-productivity editing with both vim and emacs
• A comprehensive, 286-page command reference section–now with revised and expanded indexes for faster access to the information you need
• Instructions for updating systems automatically with apt-get and yum
• Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence
• And much more, including coverage of BitTorrent, gawk, sed, find, sort, bzip2, and regular expressions

 

 

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for the First Edition of A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming 

 

“First Sobell taught people how to use Linux…now he teaches you the power of Linux. A must-have book for anyone who wants to take Linux to the next level.”

—Jon “maddog” Hall, Executive Director, Linux International

 

“This book is a very useful tool for anyone who wants to ‘look under the hood’ so to speak, and really start putting the power of Linux to work. What I find particularly frustrating about man pages is that they never include examples. Sobell, on the other hand, outlines very clearly what the command does and then gives several common, easy-tounderstand examples that make it a breeze to start shell programming on one’s own. As with Sobell’s other works, this is simple, straight-forward, and easy to read. It’s a great book and will stay on the shelf at easy arm’s reach for a long time.”

—Ray Bartlett, Travel Writer

 

“Overall I found this book to be quite excellent, and it has earned a spot on the very front of my bookshelf. It covers the real ‘guts’ of Linux—the command line and its utilities—and does so very well. Its strongest points are the outstanding use of examples, and the Command Reference section. Highly recommended for Linux users of all skill levels. Well done to Mark Sobell and Prentice Hall for this outstanding book!”

—Dan Clough, Electronics Engineer and Slackware Linux user

 

“Totally unlike most Linux books, this book avoids discussing everything via GUI and jumps right into making the power of the command line your friend.”

—Bjorn Tipling, Software Engineer, ask.com

 

“This book is the best distro-agnostic, foundational Linux reference I’ve ever seen, out of dozens of Linux-related books I’ve read. Finding this book was a real stroke of luck. If you want to really understand how to get things done at the command line, where the power and flexibility of free UNIX-like OSes really live, this book is among the best tools you’ll find toward that end.”

—Chad Perrin, Writer, TechRepublic

 

Praise for Other Books by Mark G. Sobell

 

“I keep searching for books that collect everything you want to know about a subject in one place, and keep getting disappointed. Usually the books leave out some important topic, while others go too deep in some areas and must skim lightly over the others. A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® is one of those rare books that actually pulls it off. Mark G. Sobell has created a single reference for Red Hat Linux that can’t be beat! This marvelous text (with a 4-CD set of Linux Fedora Core 2 included) is well worth the price. This is as close to an ‘everything you ever needed to know’ book that I’ve seen. It’s just that good and rates 5 out of 5.”

—Ray Lodato, Slashdot contributor

 

“Mark Sobell has written a book as approachable as it is authoritative.”

—Jeffrey Bianchine, Advocate, Author, Journalist

 

“Excellent reference book, well suited for the sysadmin of a Linux cluster, or the owner of a PC contemplating installing a recent stable Linux. Don’t be put off by the daunting heft of the book. Sobell has strived to be as inclusive as possible, in trying to anticipate your system administration needs.”

—Wes Boudville, Inventor

 

“A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® is a brilliant book. Thank you Mark Sobell.”

—C. Pozrikidis, University of California at San Diego

 

“This book presents the best overview of the Linux operating system that I have found. . . . [It] should be very helpful and understandable no matter what the reader’s background: traditional UNIX user, new Linux devotee, or even Windows user. Each topic is presented in a clear, complete fashion, and very few assumptions are made about what the reader knows. . . . The book is extremely useful as a reference, as it contains a 70-page glossary of terms and is very well indexed. It is organized in such a way that the reader can focus on simple tasks without having to wade through more advanced topics until they are ready.”

—Cam Marshall, Marshall Information Service LLC, Member of Front Range UNIX Users Group [FRUUG], Boulder, Colorado

 

“Conclusively, this is THE book to get if you are a new Linux user and you just got into the RH/Fedora world. There’s no other book that discusses so many different topics and in such depth.”

—Eugenia Loli-Queru, Editor in Chief, OSNews.com

About the Author

Mark G. Sobell is President of Sobell Associates Inc., a consulting firm that special­izes in UNIX/Linux training, support, and custom software development. He has more than twenty-five years of experience working with UNIX and Linux systems and is the author of many best-selling books, including A Practical Guide to Fedora™ and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Fourth Edition; A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux®, Second Edition; and A Practical Guide to UNIX®for Mac OS® X Users (coauthored with Peter Seebach), all from Prentice Hall; and A Practical Guide to the UNIX System from Addison-Wesley.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 1080 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 2 edition (November 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131367366
• ISBN-13: 978-0131367364
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #335,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #83 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > Linux > Programming

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

192 of 197 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Book Review: A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming September 23, 2005

By Dan Clough

Format:Paperback

I recently was fortunate enough to receive a review copy of this book from Prentice Hall publishers, and am happy to submit this review. I found this very large volume (1008 pages!) to be quite interesting and a valuable source of information for both Linux beginners and veterans alike. As the title may suggest, it covers some of the most commonly used Linux commands, the two main editors (Vim and Emacs), and some shell programming techniques with the Bash and tcsh shells. I found it to be quite "distro-neutral", as the material presented should be available on virtually any Linux system, and does not reference distro-specific tools. The book seems very well organized into Parts and Chapters, and there are also some excellent appendices and additional matter at the end of the book, which I'll discuss later in this review.

Part I is entitled "The Linux Operating System", and starts out with some introductory "welcome" and "getting started" material which is good reading for newbies but can easily be skipped by others. The next chapter in this part covers how to use the more commonly used commands such as ls, cp, rm, and tar. This is followed up by a chapter on the Linux filesystem, including the hierarchical layout, directories, pathnames, permissions, and file links. There is a nice section in this chapter which describes what is found in nearly all of the standard directories such as /boot, /etc, /home, /usr, and so on. Also notable here was an excellent description of how to set (and understand!) file and directory permissions. The final chapter in this part provides an introduction to the shell and command line. It covers standard input/output, redirection, pipes, and backgrounding of commands. Most of the information in these first 5 chapters will probably be a review for more experienced Linux users, but they are outstanding reading for newcomers. One thing I did notice as a great feature of the book is that there is a "Chapter Summary" at the end of each chapter which is really excellent, and a list of "Exercises" to help you see and use the information in a more hands-on way.

Part II is called simply "The Editors", and devotes about 60 pages each to Vim and Emacs. A brief history of each is provided, and a pretty good tutorial of basic usage is walked through. Both chapters include a command referance/summary, and some customization tips. Even the well known "debate" about which editor to use is mentioned, although no preference is indicated. For the record, this writer prefers Vim... J There are more in-depth books available to explain each editor in greater detail, but these chapters provide a good introductory lesson.

Part III contains two chapters, one each on the "bash" shell and the "tcsh" shell. Some of the procedures and concepts in this part may well be more information than is desired by many Linux users, but command-line types will want to read all of this material. The differences between these two shells are discussed, and the fact that most users will only need to learn about "bash", as it is normally the default shell on most modern Linux distributions. I found some good information on customizing your shell, and using the "dot files" such as .bash_profile and .bashrc to control things like aliases and your environment variables.

Part IV covers "Programming Tools". The first chapter here discusses programming in C, including the basics of the gcc compiler, using shared libraries, debugging procedures, system calls, and source code management (CVS). It should be noted that this chapter describes the process of writing and compiling programs with C, but is not intended to teach C programming if you don't already understand most of it. The next chapter (11) is a quite extensive (about 100 pages) discussion of programming with the Bash shell. It covers control structures, parameters, variables, loops, arrays, expressions, functions, and builtin commands. Numerous examples are shown to help with understanding the concepts. I would recommend this particular chapter for those wishing to increase their ability to write effective shell scripts for system administration. The final two chapters in Part IV cover the "gawk" and "sed" utilities, which are essential for more advanced text processing and shell scripting. Again, there are numerous excellent examples given which really aid in understanding the material, followed by some suggested excercises for putting your new knowledge to work. This part should be required reading for any system administrator.

Part V is the "Command Reference" section. This is a very complete reference (240 pages) on how to use virtually all Linux utilities and shell builtins, from "at" to "xargs". The layout for each command is presented in the manner of a man page, only much more readable and including excellent notes and examples which are not found in a man page. All options are well explained, and there is extensive use of tables and summaries. This may be the most useful portion of the entire book, and serves both as a great refresher for veterans, and a nice learning process for beginners. The material here is presented in "plain English", which helps a lot.

The remainder of the book is made up of three appendixes, a glossary, and an index. Appendix A is an excellent presentation of "regular expressions", an often little-understood but important skill for system administrators to have. Spend some time reading this one. Appendix B is simply called "Help", and tells you about the wide array of help resources available to a Linux user. Helpful websites are listed, and mailing lists and newsgroups are described. The final Appendix C touches on keeping your system updated, although it is quite limited by only discussing the "yum" and "apt" utilities. This could have been done a little better by including some additional distro tools, and/or more generic ideas for updating. The final two sections of the book are a 50 page Glossary and a 50 page Index, both of which seem quite complete.

Overall I found this book to be quite excellent, and it has earned a spot on the very front of my bookshelf. It covers the real "guts" of Linux - the command line and it's utilities, and does so very well. It's strongest points are the outstanding use of examples, and the Command Reference section. Highly recommended for Linux users of all skill levels. Well done to Mark Sobell and Prentice Hall for this outstanding book!

52 of 54 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Guide to becoming a Linux guru and not just a user September 17, 2005

By Harold McFarland HALL OF FAMEVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

For some people knowing how to do something through a graphical interface is akin to knowing how to drive without knowing how an engine, transmission, etc. work together to make the car run. For them knowing how to get down to the command line and get things done that either the graphical interface does not allow or does not do the way you want it done is a matter of pride and represents the dividing line between a user and a power user. If you want to become a real Linux guru and know how to work the command line to do whatever you want including commands, editing, shell programming, and scripting this is one of the better books available. Readable, straight-forward, educational, it is a one-of-kind reference that blends the educational aspect of a typical book on learning Linux with a typical book of command line references. A Practical Guide to Linux is highly recommended.

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for Newbies who want to Program January 10, 2007

By Fred D. Lewis

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I found this book to be very understandable. I have no experience with Linux but I was writing scripts without any trouble.