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53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Surprised me, March 2, 2004
This review is from: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (Paperback)
I often take a dim view of books that use superlatives in their titles. I also don't think there is anything "wicked cool" about shell scripting in general: if you need anything complex at all, Perl or something else is probably a much better way to to it. Shell scripting gets awfully nasty awfully fast. However, I was wrong. Yes, shell scripting is an abominable way to approach most of the tasks this book explores. Just the same, the author does it "wicked cool" and you can learn a lot both from how he sees the problem and the other Unix tools he uses as part of the script. So while you might shudder at the idea of writing a link-checker in Bash, the author's clever use of Lynx's "traverse" flag is something you might make use of elsewhere. You'll find useful things like that throughout the book, and even if you'd rather write it in Perl or whatever, the logic is worth examining. Mac OS X users will appreciate that a whole chapter is devoted to that. There's nothing particularly deep there, nothing you will be surprised by, but it's nice to see Mac get specific mention. That brings up another important point: shells are different and Unixes are different. The author does pay a lot of attention to the differences that can cause problems for your scripts when they need to run on different platforms.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Try Scripting Web Applications, March 2, 2004
This review is from: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (Paperback)
The book is aimed at all users and systems administrators of linux and every unix variant, including most importantly the MacOS. If you already know some scripting, you should be quite at ease here. Taylor does decide to restrict his discussion to the Bourne shell and its descendent, bash. He drops the C shell! But, as he points out, the scripts he gives can be easily rewritten in the latter if you desire. The book can be roughly divided into two parts. The first is essentially traditional scripting tasks. A user from 1988 would see original material here, but no qualitative surprises. The second half of the book is more interesting. It centres on Web applications. For example, when running a Web server that uses CGI, Perl and C are often the choice for implementing logic. But sometimes you can get by with a simpler approach - using a Bourne shell. Taylor shows how to do this to make simple web pages, with images, even. Cool! Though this outlook lacks the full expressive power of generating dynamic pages via Java Server Pages/Servlets, these latter alternatives can be quite forbidding to learn. If you are already comfortable with sed, awk, grep [etc], you may want to try this approach, provided your web site is not too complex. In summary, the web scripting approach suggested here may be the most distinctive and useful sections. Worth checking out.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Packed with practical information..., January 16, 2005
This review is from: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (Paperback)
Another one of my goals this year is to get familiar with Linux and shell scripting. I have some "how to" books, but I also picked up Dave Taylor's Wicked Cool Shell Scripts - 101 Scripts For Linux, Mac OS X, and UNIX Systems (No Starch Press). Taylor's done a great job with this book.
Chapter List: Introduction; The Missing Code Library; Improving on User Commands; Creating Utilities; Tweaking Unix; System Administration: Managing Users; System Administration: System Maintenance; Web and Internet Users; Webmaster Hacks; Web and Internet Administration; Internet Server Administration; Mac OS X Scripts; Shell Script Fun and Games; Afterword; Index
Taylor didn't write this book as a tutorial on script writing. Rather, he wanted to provide a "cookbook" of scripts that people could learn from and use immediately. He also wanted something more interesting than the scripts normally found in the how to books on the market. I'd agree that he's accomplished his purpose. Each script starts with a listing of the code and an explanation of how it works. He shows you how to run the script and what the results of running the script should be. Finally, there's a "hacking the script" paragraph that explains how you might want to modify the script to do something different. This entire package of paragraphs in each script serves as a sort of "mini-lesson" on some aspect of script writing.
As I mentioned above, I'm not quite ready for this book right now. When I pick up some fundamentals, I'll be heading into the Web and Internet Users section. There's code there on using Lynx and shell scripts to strip out information from websites. I have a project in mind I've wanted to do for some time, and I think I finally found the tools that will allow me to do it.
As a side note: LinuxWorld Magazine voted this book the Best Shell Script Programming Book of 2004. So I'm not the only one who thinks it's pretty good...
A well-written book packed with a ton of practical information. If you have a background in shell scripting and you want to stretch a little, this is the book for you...
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