Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Paperback
$10.86 - $36.77

List Price: $49.99 Details

Save: $13.22 (26%)

FREE Returns

FREE delivery Wednesday, March 27

Or fastest delivery Tuesday, March 26. Order within 10 hrs 44 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$36.77 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Wednesday, March 27 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 15 hrs 29 mins

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Jenson Books Inc

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$36.76
& FREE Shipping. Details

Sold by: 12 September

Added

Not added

$36.76
& FREE Shipping. Details

Sold by: UBERTY.LLC

Added

Not added

$36.78
& FREE Shipping. Details

Sold by: ShopEmperium

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Ken O. Burtch

Follow

Linux Shell Scripting with Bash 1st Edition

by Ken O. Burtch (Author)

4.0 24 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$36.77","priceAmount":36.77,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"36","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"77","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"Wp9JwTqMBTrf96h734jEXEQdSXZVz49s5yKA8PdvVwj0cEzG5jvU2EGMalWsmqyMb%2B7ySazEDmKZ%2BVwSIby0iMNiWxofwtH7lwGU8mYShz3h4zrAkVrEoTRHtwi%2Fb%2B3nysxK5gObgc4%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$10.86","priceAmount":10.86,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"10","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"86","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"Wp9JwTqMBTrf96h734jEXEQdSXZVz49sqvQEm%2BLSfBWM5eiveHMqByodZHAMmu3l1umkV19WbRJCw1vhqPkeFjIpQqiSyZpuPo7aSJWbpmKtV895CHrV154JzLReHi8sR4ROtxWo3qCsp8BQFl%2Fb01HsbOmEcZzY%2FQE%2BM%2BOkErg0ZLYx%2FPoPUWgf4guIV%2F9W","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

The only book available that covers the powerful Bash shell and associated tools that are essential to any Linux programming professional.

ISBN-10

0672326426
ISBN-13

978-0672326424
Edition

1st
Publisher

Sams
Publication date

January 29, 2004
Language

English
Dimensions

7.38 x 0.98 x 9.25 inches
Print length

432 pages
See all details

Cameron Newham
292
Paperback
in Unix Shell
55 offers from $2.90

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ken Burtch graduated with a Computer Science first class honors degree from Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada and did his Masters work at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. He has been using Linux since version 0.97, at a time before Linux was popular. He is the founder of PegaSoft Canada (http://www.pegasoft.ca), an association that promotes Linux advocacy, education, and development in southern Ontario. He has worked with a number of companies, including Mackenzie Financial Corporation, one of Canada's largest mutual fund companies. Ken is an active member of the Writers' Circle of Durham Region and his award-winning short story, "Distance," was recently published in the Signatures anthology.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sams; 1st edition (January 29, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0672326426
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0672326424
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.51 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.38 x 0.98 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,288,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #448 in Computer Operating Systems (Books)
- #877 in Linux Operating System
- #8,301 in Computer Software (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.0 24 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Ken O. Burtch

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4 out of 5

24 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Andrew Pollack

To me, this is an excellent resource

Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2012

Verified Purchase

I have found the book to be very helpful, well organized, and have just the right amount and choice of information. It was easy to follow, and using it as a reference I've built many complex shell scripts.

Helpful

skeptic

Useful intermediate book on bash language. Delves into some complex and exotic topics in chapters 8-17

Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2017

Verified Purchase

This is definitely a good intermediate level book on bash. Which is a pretty rare breed of bash books :-) The book is one of the few that treat bash as a programming language. And bash in reality is a yet another scripting language, along with being a glue to
Unix commands and command like interpreter.

Each chapter has a reference section at the end. Unfortunately they are pretty much useless, but you can buy any previous edition of Sobel book for a couple of bucks instead.

I think the level of the book is intermediate and the book will be most useful not for absolute novices, but for entry level system administrators, who already know some bash and who what to improve their skills and write better scripts.

While written in 2004, the content covers some modern features of bash albeit not always correctly ;-) . The author pays attention to important but rarely understood details of bash language (and it is a complex non-orthogonal scripting language, along with being command interpreter). this dual nature of bash is the major issue in writing a good bash textbook, as it is difficult to cover both and they generally use slightly different style of expressions. .

the book covers such model features of bash as declare statement, "let" keyword (which allow wring arithmetic expressions and ((...)) which allow both arithmetic expression and arithmetic comparisons), C-style for loop and some other. Coverage of "let" (chapter 6) is bad and tit look like the author does not understand all nuances correctly, but it is better than nothing :-)

In treating bash as a regular scripting language this books competes with very few books that use similar approach. Out of my head I can name just a couple: 4
-- Classic Shell Scripting by Arnold Robbins, Nelson H.F. Beebe (2005)
-- Pro Bash Programming Scripting the GNU-Linux Shell, Second Edition by Chris F. A. Johnson & Jayant Varma (2015).

And despite the fact that the latter book was published in 2015, some elements of the language (for example, integer variables) are treated better in this book, which was published 11 years earlier, in 2004.

The book also covers some pretty exotic areas of shell programming such as writing interactive programs. And does it well. At the same time that means that some parts of the books can (and probably should) be skipped on the first reading.

Sometimes the author delves into areas that have very little value even for advanced bash programmer. That's a drawback of the book but those section can be simply skipped. Moreover some of such exotic section on the second reading actually have some value, for example you that you can use "command" directive to execute actual command even if you defined an alias of function with the same name.

The author also explains some security issues connected with the scripts. And provides several amusing anecdotes of sysadmin blunders, some of which can be includes into "sysadmin horror stories" book.

The books has a chapter on Web programming in which the author shows that bash can be used for simple web access operations. That's another very positive feature of the book.

At the same time this is definitely not an advanced book. The author lacks understanding of bash internals and his understanding of some advanced features such as eval and co-process communication is superficial, to say the best. Some of his explanations are simply wrong and some are questionable (Let keyword and double quote strings comes to mind). There is little in the book that can help you to write complex scripts.

You probably would be better off learning by example, using for example some well written open source program such as Relax_and_restore (which also contains useful style guide).

All-in-all explanations are frozen on intermediate level (level of a regular college course on shell) and interplay of features and bash warts are not mentioned.

the overview of the language is inconsistent and examples are badly written: the author introduces arithmetic expressions and double square quotes notation and then used obsolete single square notation almost everywhere. That's why I deducted one star.

Essentially for the overview of the language you can find a better books. But coverage of more complex topics in chapters 8-17 is commendable and impressive.

All in all, I would recommend this book as an intermediate text covering bash mainly as a programming language, not so much as a command line interpreter (although the book contains some unique tips for this area too; for example about interaction of bash and GNU readline with its infamous inputrc file; the author shows some interesting examples of bind command usage; although they might not work with bash 4.2 and modern version of readline, they still have some educational value ).

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

JayWNielsen

Just what I needed

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2011

Verified Purchase

This book has exactly what I was looking and more.
Excellent book.

I like the reference section at the end of each chapter, because sometimes I only need syntax.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Computer_Geek

Helpful, but...

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2006

Verified Purchase

Nice POSIX examples. Yes, I'm nit-picking, but the cover says the book is "comprehensive" and a comprehensive book is 800 pages, not 412 pages. You might also want to consider "Bash Shell: Essential Programs for Your Survival at Work" by Larry L. Smith

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

C. C Chin

Learn Bash script on Linux

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2013

Verified Purchase

Learning BASH on Linux. Have 3 boxes with Linux. New job, need Bash scripts.
Also LPic-1 exams too. exam 117-101

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Dr. Database

Old; Confusing; Many better references available

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2022

Old; Confusing; Obfuscates even basic syntax. Crap reference when it came out in 2005 and still pos.

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2017

Arrived, excellent

The book lacks in the comprehensive department

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2005

I really can't recommend this book to anyone.

The author poorly defines the meaning of certain characters, makes references to topics he never covers in the book, and gives only cursory explanations of some key elements on Bash scripting. To make matters worse, several examples are missing characters or have additional characters that prevent the reader from understanding the scripts.

For example, I/O redirection gets only two pages in the entire book. I kept waiting for him to re-visit redirection in more depth, but he never did. Not only that, but one of the few I/O redirection samples has a typo that leaves the reader puzzled as to how redirection works at all. The typo is so bad that it renders the entire example incorrect.

I think this book was written by and for system administrators who need to do smaller tasks, rather than for developers who both want and need to understand the fundamentals of how Bash scripting works. After reading the entire book, all I gained was a basic Bash vocabulary. I was forced to find more comphrensive books and scripts on the topic in order to understand "how stuff works" and be proficient enough to write scripts on my own.

16 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Rui Moreira

Good Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 14, 2013

Verified Purchase

Very good overview of the Bash Shell well written and with nice explanations of how Bash works.
Nice book and in good state.

Thiago Mattos

Good purchase

Reviewed in Germany on September 24, 2010

Verified Purchase

This is a good book. If you want to learn Linux Shell scripting, this is your book.

See more reviews

Return this item for free