Customer Reviews

Think UNIX

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a "One Horse" book, that horse being to teach UNIX to those who have used Windows or Macintosh OS's their whole life. Although I have been learning UNIX for over a year, and would like to think I know a little bit about it, it tends to be hard to remember how to tell someone else how to "do this" or "that". This book is great for that. This takes a user who knows how to use a mouse and keyboard, and knows how to navigate under a "windowed" operating system into the world of command prompts and even the X-Windows system. Don't expect this to make you a system administrator, it doesn't even touch many of the things a user doesn't need to know, but it does fulfill its purpose. If you would like to learn UNIX so you can install LINUX on your machine at home, this can be a great start. While a UNIX's are different in some way's, Jon tends to stick to common themes, and points out when a command just has a different name. If you would like to "remember" what your users don't know, this is also great for you. It's a great book to recommend for a user to learn on their own.

The reason I cannot call Mr. Lasser's book a "life-saver" is because I would not have perished from the Earth without it. Indeed, I probably would have figured almost all of the stuff in this book out, given six or seven years. But you gotta ask yourself, "at what cost?" In hair torn out (it's leaving fast enough, isn't it?), in hyperventilation (save that for the gym), in premature aging.

This book is not for Dummies. This book works best with people, as I may have indicated above, who Would Have Figured It Out by themselves. But while you may pretend to enjoy a rugged hike through the steeper parts of the learning curve, Mr. Lasser's book is like strapping on a jet-pack.

The book is conversational, sometimes funny (though it helps if you spend a lot of your time in front of computers), and extremely direct. If you are just curious about what this Unix thing might be good for, read the book slowly, learn a lot, and gain a solid foundation for becoming the captain of your computing destiny. If you have something you need to get done, read it quickly, learn-- well, a lot, and get where you're going in a hurry.

One caution: this book does expect that you will read it. It is not a ready reference, it is not designed for index-backward utilization. It is a short course in the skeletal framework of Unix, and not a hypertext instruction manual. If you are unaccustomed to reading as it was practiced before computer self-help books arrived to chaff the bookstores of our nation, you will not derive the maximum benefit from this book.

I recommend this book to (prospective) users of unix systems who take pleasure in reading, and need to learn a great deal very quickly.

Cutting to the chase; an excellent book! I strongly recommend it if you are clear about what it is intended to accomplish. (The author even goes so far as to state his intent in the Introduction.)

This book gives an overall understanding of the underpinnings of the Unix (and therefore the Linux) operating systems. It provides a broad-brush overview of how and why 'nix works the way it does, from file structures to manual formats.

It does not provide detailed instruction in setting up or operating a system, in administering security programs or protocols, or even in programming.

But if you learn like I do (actually, like most people do...) your learning cycle is greatly shortened if you first get a broad-brush overview. It provides a foundation for all the details that come later.

If your intent is to learn *nix, my suggestion would be to buy or download a distribution (heck, some 'detail' books even come with one). Then go through the pain and suffering of installing it. (Hint: this is the reason to buy a book or distribution; the manual is very useful!) Then, buy this book to understand what your new system is doing - and why. Once you have, you'll be able to use the detail books, the 'bibles,' far more effectively. You'll even be able to use the documentation that comes with the system - or is readily available on the web - the way it is intended to be used.

It was been noted in a previous review that there are a number of technical inaccuracies and typos in the book. I suspect this is the price to be paid for the rapid release of technical books we see these days. I, for one, would rather put up with some errors that an on-line errata clears up than have to wait until a book is perfect, but completely out of date and useless.

If you think about it, having the problems corrected quickly via on-line 'patch' is the business model of the modern world!

Again, a strong recommendation for this one. It's a very useful document to have, know, and refer to!

This is one of the finest elementary Unix primers ever written. Rather than focusing on specific flavors or specific results, this book teaches Unix at the conceptual level, giving you the skills needed to get at least a little work done on any system (like how to read man pages, how to navigate X windows, and how to use the editor of the gods, vi). Additionally, the material on shell scripting and networking was exceptional.

While this book would serve well as a textbook (it is well-indexed and includes review questions), it is also a prime choice for new Linux users of the "I got it installed, now what?" variety. The only things holding back my fifth star are the minor but unfortunately frequent errors (but it is a first printing and, to the author's credit, errata is available online). All in all, a great book, certain to get better with time.

Funny, unorthodox, well organized, this book is a great survey of the unix family of OSes, useful both for newcomers to the system with basic computing familiarity & for those who (like me) have used & learned unix haphazardly for years.

The first chapter, rather than teaching you frequently-used commands & their options, describes how to find & decipher documentation! The heart (or possibly the lymphatic system) of unix is figuring stuff out for yourself --not an easy matter if you don't know how to find out what you want to know or interpret what you've found. If you've ever stared at a man page, wondering what was wrong with your brain that you couldn't understand a word of something so detailed & apparently written in English, this book is for you!

Subsequent chapters describe files (everything in unix is a file), processes, redirection & pipes, networking, regular expressions, shells, etc. --a holistic overview of unix as a complete system.

I bought this book a while ago, but only recently got around to reading it. That's the amazing part about this book... the fact that it's readable! Most Linux/Unix books I've seen are the most boring reading material there is. Not so with this one.

Jon really knows how to keep it entertaining, while still providing an excellent introduction to [ li | u ]nix. I found myself wanting to try the examples for sheer interest and challenge. He also goes into using pipes, and teaches you how to use them effectively.

Yes, this is a great introduction, that's all it was meant to be, and it fills it's purpose superbly!

After using Linux and Solaris at different jobs for the past year, I had enough knowledge to get around and write my Perl programs. I bought 'Think Unix' to give me the background and understanding that would help me to become a 'Power User' with this OS. I was not disappointed.
At first I was a bit wary of how basic the book starts off, but Lasser starts small and works his way up to some incredibly useful explanations of the seemingly endless amount *nix utilities. More importantly, the book lives up to its name, it teaches the reader to use utilities such as sed, awk & vi in a powerful way by incorperating pipes and I/O redirects.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become a more effective *nix user, although it's important this person has a prior basic understanding.

I received Think Unix as a present, and it is absolutely great! there are clear examples of how to perform shell commands and more with optional exercises to test your knowledge of what you have read. Some of the most outstanding information in this book for me was on permissions, piping, shell scripts, & counting loops.

I highly recommend this book for people getting started in Unix/Linux.

The problem with this book that an intended audience is pretty unclear. In no way this is an introductory book. A beginner will be confused and bewilded trying to learn Unix from this book. IMHO the only role in which this book can be useful is as an add-on to the existing library for those people who already know Unix a lttle bit and can buy books for the company money. After reading the book the simple question arises: "Why this book was so rushed to the market?"

In a current form the book is a way too short to be a decent introduction and many important things are just mentioned, not explained. Unix is such a complex system that an introductory book below 500 pages is immediately suspect. And in this case suspicions are correct: this is not a competitor to Sobel's books or "Unix Complete". Again, it probably might be a useful add-on to a better introductory book, but this book cannot stand on its own.

The author is also suspect by being a coordinator of Bastille: a set of low quality Red Hat hardening scripts ;-).

There are some problematic statements and errors in examples, for example on p. 74 the author stated: "... simply type the following command to find out which shell you have:

cat /etc/passwd|grep ^ username:|cut -d : -f 7

..."

A blank after ^ is a typo and generally the whole regex should probably be in quotes. Also to get a shell for user is not that simple. For example this is incorrect if NIS or NIS+ or if any shell wrapper (for example SecureID) are installed.

All in all my impression is that this is a rather weak and rushed to the market book. Also please note that for the number of useful pages provided it's a very expensive book.

It's my first UNIX book but it really very helpful. Yo'll find lots of examples there. And the guy whi wrote it has a keen sense of humor. Strongly reccomend it if you deal with UNIX for the first time.