Customer Reviews

The UNIX and X Command Compendium: A Dictionary for High-Level Computing

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

 

 

This book is great when working with various platforms like I do in Customer Support. The only problem is they have to update it from 1994 to include more and/or less terms and their definitions. Otherwise most of the terminology is good, accurate and concise when one is trying to work with scripting or just using the commands in the book. Otherwise, an excellent book. I hope they come up eventually with an update on it.

If you want to do something in UNIX this book has the command. It won't hold your hand and teach you unix step by step, but it is an excellent reference. The book lists zillions of commands - from common to obscure - and clearly explains what they do (in different flavors even). Anyone working with UNIX should have a copy.

A complete and concise, UNIX reference book that cuts directly to the essential information that you are looking for. Well organized and easy to use, it should be on the desk of anyone who uses UNIX. A complete list of commands and what they do, this book might even help you find a command that you have always wanted but did not know existed.

I've had this tattered, water damaged, dog-eared, highlighted, and scribbled throughout its pages book for about 15 years now - and it still serves me well.

Gee! I sure am glad that I purchased the hardcover version :)

I'm sure that many people will say that it's obsolete, dated, and provides coverage of dead Unices - like SCO, and OSF/1, but UNIX is UNIX, and although I would prefer to have an updated version that retires the SCO and some other material, Obsolete this book is not.

By the very virtue of this volume being *dated*, it serves the administrator even more effectively through it's stated methodology of usage than if it was simply another current spin of the most common shell(s) and OSes.

We often, as professionals, end up pulling our hair out due to the idiosyncrasies of a particular shell, version of a shell, OS, Distro, and the expectations of the client.

In mentioning that the book needs serious updating, it should be pointed out that there's only a couple of particular OSes that are so obsolete that they should be dropped from the text (as pointed out above).

Here's the rub regarding that last paragraph: The obsolescence of 'some' of the OSes covered in this comprehensive reference is exactly why I find myself reaching for it quite often.

I do need to reference differences between Ksh, Csh, and sh particulars *in context*, and when developing shell scripts that are portable. Most folks nowadays use BASH, and we should have coverage of this in the book, as well as Zsh and perhaps even tclsh.

I love that the differences between BSD, SunOS, and SVR4 are covered, and this helps an awful lot in approaching machinery that has been running for a while in the enterprise - something that is quite common in the real world.

Still, and even though Alan Southerton passed away prior to the books publication, Perkins is still with us, and I would like to see Linux and the coverage of the GNU utilities added.

And that's the ONLY reason I didn't give this work a full 4 Stars.

Bradley D. Thornton
Manager Network Services
NorthTech.US

I am a user of BSD UNIX and this book is the most important text purchase I have made. Easy to follow, concise and with excellent descriptions, it is written in such a way for users to find solutions to their problems quickly and easily. U&XCC has excellent appendices and a generous, well written index. NEW USERS... if you are frustrated by using the Man pages, this book is the answer, the commands are all here, all 2200++ of them. Higher level users will find this text invaluable. The front cover perfectly describes what this brilliant book is.

I bought U&XCC on the strength of the other reviews and I'm not disappointed, I wish I had known about it earlier, it would have saved me a lot of time. I have already found answers to problems and I've only had the book a short while. U&XCC makes using the shell even more interesting and it encourages you to try more sophisticated commands than you would otherwise normally think of using. Far more useful and flexible than just the "point and click" restrictions of a GUI environment. Combine U&XCC with a book on scripting and you will have a great reference base.

A credit to it's authors; if anyone is wondering why this masterpiece has not been updated, the answer may be found on page vii under the Acknowledgments paragraph. U&XCC is serving as a testament to one of the authors and 16 years after the book's release, it's age has not diminished it's brilliance.

There are plenty of books that will tell you how to write UNIX scripts, and there are plenty of books on the UNIX operating system itself. This book is unique because it gives you building material for those scripts. It is basically a flavor-neutral listing of UNIX and X commands along with their options and a brief description of how to use these commands along with examples. Everyone knows about grep, awk, and sed, but if you need a wider vocabulary of UNIX commands for a script, look no further. Along with the grep Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)), it is one of my most useful UNIX reference books.

It does need updating, but after fifteen years it is still one of the most useful books in the UNIX section of my technical library. Highly recommended.

I have had quite a few Unix Command books. THere is none that I use more than this book. There are more than enough examples and references to answer quite a few questions.

I have had this book for a while, and have found many uses for it. I've learned about UNIX from it, but even more-so, have used it to find out what commands are. It's great for newbies and experienced UNIX users. Great reference... does not pretend to be anything other than it is.

While trying to document a large UNIX system, I had the unhappy task of decoding some bizarre commands to explain what they meant. I don't think I could have done it without this book! It's an excellent reference.

This is my most valuable UNIX book. The real-life examples, both stand-alone commands and piped-together commands always come though when I don't remember exactly how to do something. The keyword index is grouped by functional categories, so, if you know that you want to do "job control" and not a "printing" command, then you are 80% of the way to finding the command that you want in the index. The authors did the work, so I don't have to. What a great, great book for anyone dealing with UNIX.