Customer Reviews

UNIX Made Easy

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I have been teaching with this book for many years, over 700 students. Class evaluations always rate the book very highly with comments about how clear explanations are. Students learn so much doing the exercises that class discussions are at a much higher level. We use this text in classroom and internet distance learning with great success. The few students over the years who had trouble in the class were trying to avoid doing the work by just looking up answers. That approach isnot effective because the book is built skill upon skill. Students must start at the beginning and actually do the work at the terminal. At first a few students tried to just read it. That approach did not work either. Now I make it very clear that the book is a detailed, hands-on, guide coupled with exact explanations. It must be worked through carefully, at the terminal. When students are willing to put in the effort and do that, they are well rewarded with knowledge and the ability to really do UNIX. I suspect the two reviewers who found the book difficult were not using it properly. My students love it.

I have come back to this book more times then I can count. Its a great book for building basic Unix skills, and a nice introduction to shell programming. John is also an excellent teacher, and for anyone who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, look for Johns "Unix Made Easy" class at the UC Berekely Extension. Two thumbs up!

Now if we can just get John to write a book on system administration...

This book is seen as the essential learning tool around here. It guides us along without pain to the place where we are really quite confident and quite skilled. Clearly it must be used hands on -- at the terminal -- it gives instructions, then explanations in a way that knowledge and skills grow quickly. It is obvious that the authors know a lot about how people learn and how to support that learning.

Although not a reference book, command summaries are located at the ends of all chapters and the index is extensive allowing us to go back to look at a topic easily.

Can't understand why it isn't 5 stars from everyone. Lots of good concise reference books out there -- this one does not attempt to be that. This book is like a tutor, but costs a lot less.

Before reading this book, I knew nothing about UNIX. Now that I've finished it, I am able to write code and understand how UNIX actually works. This is a great book for those that are planning to start a new career using UNIX or students that are taking UNIX in school for the first time. The author gives very good sample programs that are easy to understand along with step by step guidelines that shows readers how to use the UNIX utilities. This book is a very good buy!!!

This is an excellent tutorial for the absolute beginner. It assumes that you know nothing about UNIX, but that you do have access to a UNIX box and that you will be able to spend some time in front of it each day practicing the exercises given in the book. Most of the book is concerned with the command line, but you will be given a few exercises to do in regards to the X Windows system. The basic UNIX utilities are covered simply and adequately, the file system is covered in detail, as is text editing with vi. Near the end of the book, you are given some Bourne shell scripting exercises which are helpful in system configuration. this book does not cover installation and configuration and is definitely not intended for anyone with even a small measure of real-world experience with UNIX. Is basically a tutorial and nothing more, but will get you up to speed if you are 100% new to this OS.

This is a marvelous book for beginners. You get step-by-step instructions for the usual stuff, and easily readable and very informative chapters on some things not usually covered in beginner books, like network considerations and using awk. I would have gone insane were it not for this book.

In 20 years of learning computers from books (usually with great pain)I have found only one book that really teaches. This is it.
The authors must have watched a lot of students learn because they guided me through some crazy stuff without leading me into the abyss. Every time I wondered about something the next paragrah or exercise led me to the answer. Was a great mix of fun and careful work. Best, I am now really good at the job.

This text is a wonderful way to actually learn how to do unix. It told me what to type, explained what was going on, and gave me enough repitition to actually master the skills. The author anticipated my questions and mistakes. In less that a week I have become quite solid -- I can not only use the commands, I can solve problems. The text is not a cook book. It is a guided examination that I used at the terminal. Although not a reference book, the command summaries at the ends of the chapters made finding answers easy. The mix of hands on guidance and detailed explanations of the underlying structure was perfect for us.

I thought this was a great book for learning UNIX for some of the same reasons that other reviewers hated it. I liked his repeating a concept over from several angles at several different sections of the book. I liked his thousands of examples. I liked the fact that he mostly only empasized important features and not every little aspect of a command. I liked how fast I could read the book without getting bogged down in asoteric exercises in semantics of technical command descriptions. True, if you want a technical reference book on UNIX commands, this probably isn't the book for you. But I think this book truely fulfills it's title; it does make UNIX as easy as possible to learn.

This is an excellent book for anyone wanting to get comfortable with the UNIX commandline environment. The book is primarily geared toward the novice. And as such, it will show you the ropes -- by first explaining something, then having you actually perform a series of steps that demonstrate and reinforce what you've just learned. In a nutshell, this is a tutorial-based approach to learning UNIX. And I've long been an advocate of this approach to learning computers, especially when learning something unfamiliar. In my opinion, it is simply the very best approach to getting you up to speed quickly.

Most other books on the subject of UNIX seem to be references, rather than tutorials. While the reference books are essential for an intermediate to advanced user, a good tutorial-based book is much better for the novice student. In that regard, this book is perfect.

Lastly, the text printed on the pages is larger than you'll find in other books, but it's essential to how you will work with this book. You'll be looking back-and-forth between the book and the computer monitor, and the larger text will help you easily find where you last left the page.