Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!

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.

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

As a newcomer to Unix and Linux operating systems, I just needed a reference so I could be productive enough to perform tasks without relying on others. The book enabled me to do this. I read the other reviews about how the book works for both beginner and advanced users. I borrowed 2 books before buying this one. This one is the only one I use.

This book is the best distro-agnostic foundational Linux reference I've ever seen, out of dozens of Linux-related books I've read. It's a constant battle to find a good Linux book that isn't wedded implicitly or explicitly to a specific distribution (usually something Red Hat related), more about KDE and GNOME applications and other specific applications the authors favor than about real Linux skills, or both. 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 unixlike OSes really live, this book is among the best tools you'll find toward that end. About the only way it could be better is to be released under an open documentation license.

This is a very nice book for novice unix users.

This book put everything in perspective/context. It starts with a short history of Linux/Unix/GNU and the relation between each other.

It is also a very complete book. It covers the main commands, editors, shell programming, et. cetera.

The nice thing (especially for novice people), is that there are a lot of examples with a description what it does. The examples are very usable. Because a lot of examples use multiple commands this book can also been seen as a cookbook how you can do certain task using e.g. the command line interface.

So this book is not one big printed man pages (a lot of other books are).

One little disadvantage is that this book need some updating. E.g. CVS is covered but the emerging Subversion not. Maybe it is a good idea to cover also subversion in the next edition.

I really wanted to like this book as I am now a regular linux desktop user and want to learn shell/perl scripting. Unfortunately this book has been a tremendous letdown. The presentation of topics and the code examples do not build on one another and the ordering too often seems haphazard.

Readability of code samples is hindered by not numbering lines of code. It's a lot easier to read when the text says "Line 24 specifies the variable...." instead of trying to find the line referenced by "The third say statement specifies the variable....".

Most damning in my mind is the repeated sin of referencing material not yet covered in examples. So when I am reading page 200 there is no reason to throw out a code sample with material that won't be covered until page 450. This book is replete with examples like this! It's as if they had a general idea of the topics they wanted to cover, they wrote the text and code samples for each topic and only then decided on the order in which to present the information. I'm sorry to report that learning from this book is far more frustrating than it should be.

This book is remarkably well written. It is wonderfully clear and precise. Topics are introduced in a logical order, with great care taken to build on previous concepts. This is a book that works well for beginners as well as for more experienced users, or as a refresher. There is enough explanation so that someone can grasp a new concept, and yet the explanation is sufficiently concise so that it doesn't slow down someone who already has some Unix/Linux skills and is simply reviewing. The book excels in every respect: chapter organization, sub-topic organization, and clear typographical conventions. But the biggest strength of the book is simply the clarity of the writing.

If you are a beginner/intermediate linux user in need of tutorial style treatment of commands, editors and shell programming then look no further. The author has done an excellent job presenting the chapters, from the basics to more advanced, gradually building on the concepts learned, in a simple, easy-to-read text. This book shines in explaining the commands with relevant examples and differs from the others in not being a printed man pages. The author also details the subtleties of shell (bash and tc) and shell commands where appropriate. The chapters on sed and gawk are invaluable, so are the chapters on vim and emacs. This book also doubles as an excellent command reference - Part 5 of the book is dedicated to this.

This book neither teaches you nor is intended to teach the nuances of mounting/unmounting devices, loading modules, managing disks and partitions, runlevels, boot sequences and boot loaders, networking, user administration and such. Linux administrator handbook by Evi Nemeth et al and How Linux Works by Brian Ward fills this gap nicely.

The verdict:
Reads so well cover to cover. Highly recommended for beginners.

Mark Sobell's "A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, Second Edition" follows a number of other "Practical Guides" that Sobell has authored on different flavors of Unix and Linux. Its title is quite descriptive, as it does not contain any material on GUIs, networking, printing, and so on.

The Good: this is basically two books for the price of one. The 300-page reference section toward the end of the book is very good: it contains tables of command arguments in a visually pleasing layout, specific notes, and on top of that it also includes exactly what the man pages sorely lack: detailed examples! Thus, the command reference in Part V alone is worth buying the book for. Sobell covers 100 utilities, ranging from one-page pointers (e.g. cal, renice, strings, wc) to mini-tutorials (e.g. find, grep, make, pax, sort). The early part of the book is 600 pages long and is intended to be both a tutorial and a reference. Sobell is explicitly trying to be novice-friendly: he has included chapter summaries, exercises (with answers to even-numbered exercises provided on his website), a glossary in an appendix, as well as numerous tables summarizing lessons learned (or about to be introduced). Such tables are scattered throughout the text and in the case of a few chapters (notably the ones on vim and emacs) they are also repeated in the form of very useful chapter summaries. Sobell is very good both at cross-referencing material and at collecting all the relevant information in one place. The first 5 chapters deal with the basics of interactive shell usage and are pedagogically sound, probably more so than the chapters that follow. After that, the author covers two different text editors and two different shells. Though Sobell doesn't seem to favor vim over emacs (or vice versa), in the case of shell programming he is unambiguous: "Do not use tcsh as a programming language ... If you are going to learn only one shell programming language, learn bash." (p. 350). On a different note, Sobell also includes various asides which are perhaps not necessary but are fun to read about, e.g. on the tee or the pstree utilities.

The Bad: this book tries to be two things at the same time, tutorial and reference, and succeeds more in the latter than in the former. This is unfortunate: this volume is too elementary for advanced Linux users, yet it may be too difficult for those with limited experience. A few examples of suboptimal pedagogy: a) Sobell seems to have a mix-and-match approach to writing new books, e.g. in chapter 4 the use of fstab and mount comes out of nowhere and is never really explained -- though it is explained in chapter 12 of Sobell's book on Ubuntu. b) Chapter 6 is nominally about the vim text editor, but in reality it's lacking pretty basic stuff (e.g. gg). Sobell seems to be more interested in old-school vi, ignoring vim capabilities like folding, keyword completion, and (most importantly) vim's visual mode. c) The organization of the material is not always sound: e.g. to understand the introduction to bash in chapter 8 one has to read portions of chapter 10 on bash programming. Unfortunately, the same also holds for the first half of chapter 10 itself, in which Sobell repeatedly uses concepts that are introduced in the second half. d) When the author introduces a new tool from scratch (see chapters 12, 13, and 14 on awk, sed, and rsync, respectively) the results are underwhelming: pages upon pages of tables and definitions with all examples postponed until later. e) Even though the book contains a number of errata, as of this writing none of them have been corrected on the author's website. Some of these are potentially grave: for example, on p. 305 Sobell describes (()) by saying that it expands an arithmetic expression, but then on p. 461 he includes a tip box highlighting the distinction between arithmetic expansion, $(()), and arithmetic evaluation, (()). What's even worse, using this book as a reference is also somewhat complicated: since it's purportedly aimed at beginners it is far from complete (e.g. Sobell has nothing to say about the printf builtin), but that doesn't change the fact that one still has to lug around a 1000-page volume.

In a nutshell, this an OK introduction to interactive shell usage, but not to shell programming. O' Reilly's tutorial volumes "Learning the bash shell" and "Classic shell scripting" (both of which can be read linearly) are much better when it comes to programming. Even so, the meticulous cross-referencing and the abundance of tables make Sobell's book a decent reference. All in all, 3.5 stars.

Alex Gezerlis