Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I took a class in shell scripting and learned almost nothing...

I tried a couple of other books and then was lucky enough to findthis one.

Hey, it's short, it's clear and it has a few questions at the end of every chapter that let you test your knowledge. It's also organized so you can learn one thing at a time, which is different from others that throw lots of things at you, but don't explain them all till later.

Anyway, forget the rest. Just get this little, inexpensive book. It will get you up to speed fast.

I've spent the last month learning the basic commands of Unix. Where the real challenge of System Administration comes in is writing scripts. Never has there been a book so useful! Better than O'Reilly shell books..

This is probably one of the best books by Sams that I've read. If you want to start shell programming, you've picked up the perfect book, even if you're new to Unix. It starts off by first getting you familiar with the basic Unix commands: ls, pwd, cp, mv, cat, etc. and telling you the basics of Unix and Shells. Then it goes over file systems and modifying attributes. Later when you're comfortable, it holds your hand through the shell programming syntax, logic, substititution, regular expressions, and essential tools such as awk and sed. This book contains other gems and snippets that have helped me through many projects. Overall good buy.

This book provides a very good foundation so that one may learn Unix shell scripting. It also allows one to understand the more advanced books, which is very important. I thought there were some sections of the book that were a bit sketchy in their explanation. For example, the no-op operator (:) was not explained to my liking (although a fairly good attempt was made). Overall, however, the beginner to Unix will learn much from this book.

Glad to see the other good reviews. I was impressed and wanted to see what others had to say.

This is the way it should be done. Definitely appreciated the emphasis on the bash shell and the inclusion of other useful tools. Pleasantly surprised by the depth and quality of the examples...this is one of the best book in SAMS catalog. Author also had a chapter or two in Kao's Special Edition Using Unix, which was a solid book even though it is a major doorstop in size. Looking forward to more titles from Veeraraghavan.

It looks like the quality of non-O'Reilly titles may be improving after all...

This book has a clear explanation of the basics of shell programming. I can honestly say I used this book to teach myself shell programming. I just ordered my own copy, because having used a friends to learn, I now use it as a desk reference.

Coming from a Windows and mainframe world, I started with absolutely no idea of the Unix environment. My job is to automate a pretty involved set of manual processes within the next few of weeks!! After a couple of days of using the book and trying out the examples, I feel quite confident about tackling the job at hand. The book explains the basic Unix concepts and tools in a very clear and purposeful manner. The topics are presented in the proper sequence, so I did not encounter a reference that had not been covered earlier in the book. I simply want to congratulate the author on a job well done.

the author does a good job to demonstrate the basic on how to write shell scripts. The book contains useful tips and examples (real life problems you may face in your daily job), but keep on mind you'll need more advanced material to master UNIX shell scripts. ...

I have not used shell scripting in the long time. I ordered this book and it helps me refresh a lot about Unix and shell scripting leanrt in school many years ago as undergraduate student. The book is well-written and will keep you excited. One important thing is: practice as you are reading. By the time you finish the book you should be able to grab much from the book. I downloaded the Sun Solaris 9 that I installed on x86 computer and I am playing with some flavors of shell writing small shell scripts.

I came from purely Windows environment and I know nothing about UNIX or Linux except a few C commands many years ago. I tried a few books like shell scripting, learning the shell and by example, but I gave up as their speed was too fast for a beginner like me. Only after a few intro pages, these books started to write complex commands which I was confused and unable to continue. The worst thing is, most of them don't explain in details what those commands do and expect readers to know. This book does not assume you know basic UNIX commands, and it covers the basics in first section. It has short chapters and each of them tries to teach you the basic concepts in one area with simple examples. This is the book that gives you confidence to move on and it does not try to feed you with too much knowledge at a time. After reading this book, you are equipped with basic idea of what shell scripting is and able to move on with advanced books. A very good step-by-step book for beginners who know very little or nothing about UNIX shell programming.