Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGood for Beginners. Not much else
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 29, 2017
Let me start by saying this is a good book for shell beginners to start with, and I want to really give it 3.5 stars, but it is hard to like.
I powered through it because people kept saying they learned something new after X years of programming, but that wasn't true for me. You guys need to read the Bash manual and really have your mind blown. Anyway:
Pros:
- Good introduction to scripting for complete beginners
- Pretty Cover picture
Cons:
- Poorly formatted pages/code. Felt like they just hit upload on a word doc and didn't look at how it was formatted
- Errors in the code. Small typos, forgetting to add a ! to the shebang a lot, etc. Obviously didn't run all of these examples
- Only 84 pages long. Most of those are repeated code blocks and exercises. Felt like a resume bullet/link to the author's paid website
- Suggests questionable practices (Parsing ls, echo instead of printf, not taking more advantage of builtins like $0 for the script name or mktemp for making tmp files, setting exit 0 on a test of exit 0 anyway, etc.)
- Spends a long time talking about debugging but doesn't mention actually helpful tools like shellcheck, BATS, etc.
- Doesn't really talk about when NOT to use a shell script
- Also, this is all Bash based with hardly any mentions of portability. So it should just be called "Bash Scripting"
All in all, the price is right if you have never scripted anything, but there are much better resources out there like Greg's Wiki, tldp, or even the Unix Stack Overflow
