Amazon.com Review
In
Unix: Visual QuickStart Guide, the authors take the time to explain correct Unix lingo as well as concepts and processes to be aware of as a daily user. The real-life implication of reading
Unix is not only that you
won't receive irate messages from your system administrator, but that you'll be able to manipulate your Unix environment, making it a genuinely enjoyable workspace.
For more experienced users, there are plenty of cool tools and shortcuts to make the book worthwhile (sdiff, head, and procmail, for example). The authors provide a generous section on scripting--a good introduction for advanced users who may be spending too much time on repetitive tasks. The authors also touch on how to intelligently include regular expressions in searching, a pleasant addition to an already outstanding section.
Some of the authors' decisions on what to include merit warning, although not enough that users should turn away from this book: the authors only cover the bash, ksh, and csh shells; they focus on only the pico and vi editors--not emacs; and their excellent section on e-mail covers only pine (briefly mentioning that elm really isn't worth its salt for a new user). While the book isn't all-inclusive, it isn't meant to be. The authors make their preferences clear, and for the user, this amounts to a good deal of clarity and time saved. --Jennifer Buckendorff
From Library Journal
UNIX, the life blood of the Internet, is really a pretty simple operating system compared with Windows 95/98/NT. UNIX is actually a superset of the old DOS operating system, and the complexity of UNIX comes from its command line interface (i.e., no graphical user interface). To use the full power of UNIX, the user must know what to type, not simply answer questions. The Rays' book is an excellent beginner's guide and covers everything from viewing and manipulating files and directories to editing files with either VI or Pico to configuring environmental variables, running shell scripts, reading E-mail, encoding and decoding data, and installing software. While not for everyone, this should be popular in both public and academic libraries.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
