Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

Having heard many good things about the books by Arnold Robbins, on a rainy day of winter (Jul 2011) in college I found some chapters of this book in the "Linux System Administration" course and after having read them I began to wonder "why?"

"Why only a few chapters and not the whole book?"

I bought the ebook version and I saw with my own eyes how pleasant it's to read a book by Arnold Robbins.
A book aimed for those who have some basic experience in Shell, those who are Unix System Administrators or Scripters with years of experience in the Unix command line.

Arnold Robbins and Nelson H. F. Beebe say not only how the shell works, the useful commands, but also how to do it in the shell's way. I don't know about you, but I saw programmers doing some shell scripts as if they were programming in Java or C/C++, people who can't know how to use the power of shell. Because that this book is important for a novice and those who have experience too.

Another thing that impressed me was seeing so much about regular expressions that will surely show some concepts for novices in this good explanations way. (For more about regular expressions: Learning Regular Expressions, 1st Edition by Michael Fitzgerald – Upcoming… I'm waiting to read it).

I waited more about the "Chapter 15. Secure Shell Scripts: Getting Started" that how their name show us, it's just a bit of secure shell scripts.

And last but no less important, I love that tortoise.

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

I'm only about half way through this, but so far I think its a great introduction (or perhaps refresher) to *nix scripting

I'd recommend it for sure - then maybe recommend "sed & awk" as a next step

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

This is a concise, clear, no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point programmer's guide to bash shell scripting. It is the most well-written guide I have ever read!

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

I completely disagree with freejak here.

Every example in chapter 5 is well described with elaborate paragraphs of text. The only commands which are not explained are ones which are to appear in subsequent chapters, and in which case it is mentioned so.

This is an excellent book, especially if you already have some experience in scripting and unix, this book teaches you all the good options with commands, which you don't come across otherwise in day to day operation.

It also guides you on how to write scripts the right way, so that they remain portable across systems, and should work 99% of the times.

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

This is a very good introduction to the POSIX shell, as used on various Unix and Linux operating systems. The book covers the basics of how a shell works, how it can be used to write scripts and the standard Unix tool-kit that can be used to do powerful things quickly and easily.

The book is grounded in standard POSIX tools so does not take advantage of features present in the very latest Bash, Korn and Z shells, but it does mention that sometimes if you are willing to trade portability you can do things easier and quicker.

The book does not require a deep understanding of the Unix philosophy but it does help to have used the basic Unix/Linux tools in the past. As well as shell, the book covers the standard tool-kit such as cut, head, tail, grep, sed and a large chunk of awk.

The book is well written and organised and there are plenty of code snippets and explanations to keep you going. The book does not really cover the interactive use of shell, it really is all about scripting with shell as the title suggests.

If I have one problem with the book it is that there is an almost pathological avoidance of the dynamic languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby. Some of the longer shell examples would have been much better written in a more complete language such as Perl which are better suited to the larger tasks that shell is not designed for.

Combined with a good introductory books such as "Learning the Bash Shell" or "Learning the Korn Shell" you are well on the way to driving a Unix/Linux system without a mouse!

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

Seeing the pretty unfair stars from bad reviews I thought I would share my views on this book, and I will only make a single review - as to not skew the stars like the beginner did ;-)

This book is one of my all-time favourites, and I recommend it again and again to people working with UNIX. This is one of the most important books if you are an administrator in charge of various UNIX based systems.

I come from a UNIX environment at the beginning of 1990's and have used UNIX systems like HP-UX, SunOS/Solaris, Linux (SLS to Kubuntu), OpenBSD and AIX - about 15+ years of UNIX.

During this time UNIX tools and scripting has evolved tremendously and I have been caught sometimes using "yesterdays" ways of doing things.

This book immediately taught me how to do things in better ways and told me why some of my old habits should go out the door ASAP.

This book does go from beginner, having the basics of how to create a script using #! but is very dense and could be combined with some introductory stuff - another book on your favourite shell perhaps.

Over the years you will enjoy this book when working with UNIX and researching how to do a shell script task in an efficient AND portable way. To me it is an instant classic!

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

I need to make a correction to my earlier review. There are some example scripts included beginning in Chapter 5. I must have blanked these out of my memory because of their painful associations.

This is a line from the first (first!) example:

sed -e 's=^\([^:]*\):[^/]*/\([^/]*\)/.*$=\1:\2=' $OFFICE

For Pete's sake, what ever happened to "Hello World"?

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

Yesterday I officially gave up on the "Classic Shell Scripting" book. I don't like to give up on stuff, but this was a frustrating waste of time for me. After 120 pages I had had enough of SED/Awk examples, massive regular expressions, snippets that didn't work and not a single actual example of a shell script. This is not a book from which to start to learn how to write shell scripts.

I see that the other reviewers here give O'Reilly a pass by making more or less the same observation (albeit in kinder/gentler terms). I will not. The authors state in the Preface that this *is* a book for beginners to use to learn how to write Shell scripts. This is not helping the reader. This book either needs a very substantial re-write or a new, more accurate title and presentation.

After some analysis based on reader reviews I am going to take this from the top using the ""KornShell Programming Tutorial" from HP Press, authored by Barry Rosenberg. This book has garnered a average 5 star rating in reader reviews at amazon.com. Looks like a better starting point to me.

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

USA Linux Users Group Book Review

Original review posted at: http://www.usalug.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=77554 ()

Reviewer: Crouse

Book Review: Classic Shell Scripting

Authors: Arnold Robbins, Nelson H.F. Beebe

Publisher: O'reilly

First Edition May 2005

ISBN: 0-596-00595-4

560 pages, $34.95 US, $48.95 CA, £24.95 UK

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/shellsrptg/index.html ()

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/shellsrptg/errata/shellsrptg.confirmed ()

This book is designed for intermediate to advanced Linux users. The book states in the preface that before reading the book you should know some things about shell scripting already. This book isn't for those new to shell scripting. In my opinion, it kind of picks up where "Learning the Bash Shell" from O'reilly left off. It compliments that book pretty well. Each chapter builds on the concepts and materials covered in the chapter before, so it's a book that is best read front to back and not just used as a reference, you will get more from it that way.

The chapters titles show the progression of the book in what i considered to be a pretty good order. Chapter one and two start off with the basic history, and you quickly move to the next chapters which are the bulk of the book. They are as follows.

Chapter 3 Searching and Substitutions

Chapter 4 Text Processing Tools

Chapter 5 Pipelines can do Amazing Things

Chapter 6 Variables, Making Decisions, and Repeating Actions

Chapter 7 Input and Output, Files, and Command Evaluation

Chapter 8 Production Scripts

Chapter 9 Enough Awk to be Dangerous

Chapter 10 Working with Files

Chapter 11 Extended Example

Chapter 12 Spellchecking

Chapter 13 Processes

Chapter 14 Shell Portability Issues and Extentions

Chapter 15 Secure Shell Scripts

Worthy of noting are the a couple of the appendix titles.

Appendix A. Writing Manual Pages

Appendix B. Files and Filesystems.

Personally, I think these could just have easily been additional chapters in the book. The book makes nice use of examples and generally gives very detailed and descriptive explanations of those examples. The book does indeed build upon previous examples and chapters, making this a very easy to read book. I've found a lot of books simply assume that you have covered topic X somewhere already, and are much more suited for simple reference than they are actually reading. This book is useful as a reference, but it is very suited for reading as well. A lot of the commands that are used have a detailed explanation of them, plus caveats at the bottom, which is something many man pages don't include. I found those interesting as well. They provided insight into why some commands might not work as expected.

The chapters also contained a huge number of (Item / Description) type boxes for almost everything. An example would be for "Print Escape Sequences" from Chapter 7.

------------------------------------------

Sequence.................. Description

\a ............. Alert character, usually the ASCII BEL character.

\b .............. Backspace

\c ............. Suppress any final newline in the output.

........ and on down the list of escape sequences (about 8 more items in the list)

------------------------------------------



I realize that this may sound "trivial", but putting those tables of data actually IN the chapters made it much more enjoyable to read than some other books on the same subject. I was not forever having to flip to the appendix to view the data , that definitely works better "in context" right next to the examples and explanations of the subject matter.

All in all, I'd give this book a 8 out of 10 rating. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is the few errors that have been found in the book. (see above link). I actually noticed a couple myself. Nothing earth shattering, but none the less, for that alone it couldn't earn a 10 out of 10 mark. The book is an excellent companion to "Learning the Bash Shell", and if you liked that book, you'll love this one. Again, this isn't for those new to shell scripting, but is a great intermediate book. This will be a book that will have a permanent home on my bookshelf looking like an old phonebook, tattered and used. Isn't that the best sign of a great book ?

Comments about oreilly Classic Shell Scripting:

Classic Shell Scripting

Hidden Commands that Unlock the Power of Unix

By Arnold Robbins, Nelson H.F. Beebe

First Edition May 2005

ISBN: 0-596-00595-4

558 pages, $34.95

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/shellsrptg/

I found this to be quite a useful book for learning more about Unix/Linux shell scripting. I would consider this one to be an intermediate level text, and complete beginners might be better served by a more simplified book. There are quite a bit of in-depth details included, and many very nice examples and code snippets. Like all O'Reilly books, it is well organized and formatted, and clearly written.

The book opens with a brief history of Unix and how important the shell (and scripting) is to it. There are some comparisons with other programming languages, and why it is sometimes preferable to use a script versus a compiled program. The very basics of how scripts are written and used are also mentioned here, and beginners may want to refer to an additional book for more of the basic instructions.

The next few chapters cover mostly text processing with scripts, including searching, sorting, printing, extracting, and counting methods. Good examples are used, including the use of regular expressions and pipes to increase the power of your scripts. Following this, there are several chapters on more advanced scripting, including how to use variables, loops, functions, standard I/O, redirection, wildcards, using "awk", and working with external files. Extensive example code is provided throughout.

The remaining chapters of the book get into more advanced subjects such as database manipulation, process control, and increasing the security of scripts. Portability and shells other than bash are also discussed.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book (for me) were the Appendices and other sections at the end. Appendix A is entitled "Writing Manual Pages", and is extremely informative on how to produce and format a valid man page. This is a much more complicated process than I had previously known (can you say "groff"?), and is quite interesting. For anyone who has ever complained about a poor man page, this will give you all the tools you need to write an improved version! J Appendix B has some excellent in-depth discussion about Unix files and filesystems, including attributes and permissions. Appendix C is a summary of important Unix commands for shell scripting, categorized by function, which is a good quick reference list. Following this, there is an excellent Bibliography that recommends related books for further reading. Finally, there is good Glossary and an Index.

Overall, I found the book to be excellent in it's content and quality. I would recommend that a beginner also find a companion book to more gently introduce the fundamentals of shells and scripting, but this volume is excellent for the intermediate to advanced user. If you want to fully use the power of the Unix/Linux shell, this is a "must-have" book! Well done to the authors and O'Reilly Publishing.