Rating: 
Summary: Lots of tips and tricks
Review: This book consists of page after page of UNIX tips and tricks -- mostly tricks.The book is appropriate for someone who already knows UNIX and wants to learn some fancy ways to save keystrokes writing commands, make a fancy UNIX prompt, etc. In fact, Chapter 7 is devoted entirely to modifying your UNIX shell prompt. One example: have the prompt include the server name, and make the name flash on and off. There is no way in the world this should be the first UNIX book anyone buys. Beginners will be lost as the authors skip from one tip to the next, in a haphazard fashion. And it's not one of those books that provides overall coverage of a subject. A book of tricks is, without a doubt, not a book that could serve as your one and only UNIX book. There's simply too much left out. For example, check out the two chapters on shell scripting. They don't come close to providing coverage of most of the important things you need to know -- it's just a series of tips for people who already know shell scripting and want to learn some extras that are fancy or flashy or maybe save a few keystrokes. The chief flaw of this book is how immature it seems. It devotes a couple of pages to explaining how to code something, and I'm left wondering why anyone would waste their time. It has the feeling of several 14 year old boys coming up with tricks and showing them to each other. Cool! Yeah, cool! If you want to become one of those people who are very technical, but lack business sense, this is your book. Just be prepared when the senior VP says, "You wasted your time doing WHAT?!" To be fair, this book is probably a good one for the system administrator who uses UNIX all day long and already has a firm grasp of the job. At that point, why not add a few extras? Go ahead, make the prompt blink.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Big Book - but worth the hype?
Review: A Good Big Book - but worth the hype? The Unix Power Tools has already established a reputation of being a classic. The behemoth has no less that 1073 pages and goes accompanied by a CD with a lot of small shellscripts that are described in the book. The authors show a thorough understanding of the subject and are able to explain the ways of Unix in a casual talkative way. Much work is devoted to the layout and the text edition. For example, the crossreferences are well done, greyed out in readable italics. The publisher seems to understand the importance of easy readable text. Many of us know how a good book can be spoiled by hasty and bad editing, and it's a relief to see that O'Reilly takes this issue seriously. The text is divided into paragraphs of about 1/4 to 1 page in size. These paragraphs deal with the Unix commands, the shells, the history of unix or the included nifty shellscripts. One might think that the authors view Unix as a collection of structured trivia - a view I personally like. You won't read this book 'cover to cover' (to use that awful cliche), but you'll start joyreading for that bit of advice or for that handy tool they've written. (For example: the thing that got me up the wall was that filenames can have empty spaces at the end, so it seems you cannot delete them. I should have known that one way earlier :^( ) Sometimes the authors write down some very casual paragraphs: a flame from usenet (Why NOT to use the C-shell for programming), the history of a command ( grep is: g from global, RE is regular expression, and the P stands for print, hence g/RE/P) or other fun to read items. It will not be the book you'll grab for serious studying or when the system goes down unexpectedly. The problems with big books are usually twofold and this one suffers rather badly from it. First of all it is written for the novice and expert alike - a concept that comes from a marketing and not from educational point of view. The authors repeat the man pages - did you know you can find files by name with the 'find' command? And they go on for every Find option. The novice who didn't know about the find command will not try anything as fancy like to build a database with the filestructure in it in order to speed up his find command. Equally, experts won't like the basics explained. The second problem with big books is that lots of the presented material is not relevant to your need or situation. You haven't got the C-shell? Throw away a couple of pages. Don't like the chapter ' vi tips & tricks' , 'Saving time at the commandline' or 'creating custom commands in vi', then you can skip another 100 pages. Conclusion. Although lot's of information isn't relevant to your need, unix-implementation, shell or skill-level, this book is easy to read thanks to the good layout and small paragraphs. The authors truly have years of experience and have made many handy shellscripts. For those of you who want to like to master the commandline of Unix and like to skim for the golden hint, this book is a true find. But if you know what you want to learn then dedicated books present a better alternative to this somewhat unfocussed book.
Rating: 
Summary: the most tattered book on my shelf
Review: Let's get a couple things straight: one, I buy a lot of books; two, I read about 15% of each one. This book is one of the few exceptions. It already had 56 reviews when I wrote this, but after picking it up for the 84th time, I felt compelled to add my five stars. Buy with confidence.
Rating:
Summary: Power book for power users
Review: This is one of the best technical book that I bought in the last 10 years, at least from the organizational and layout point of the view. It contains hundreds of short articles, page or two in length organized in a remarkable way of cross-referenced, alamanc-like book. Articles are logically organized in chapters so you can read the book from cover to cover if you wish. However more likely you'll end up reading the book more randomly, following the cross-references. (I have some bad experience with the books organized in this way but this one is a clear exception.)
The book is written for beginners and experts alike, since I'm a Unix newbie I can only confirm that; I hate to say but the life of Unix SA would be much easier if the man pages would be organized in a similar way -- including examples that're almost never there. I'm waiting for O'Reilly to update their "Unix CD Bookshelf" with third edition of this book because it's a little too heavy for carrying it with me.
Rating:
Summary: THE BEST TECHNICAL BOOK EVER MADE
Review: UNIX POWER TOOLS is really the best book on UNIX/LINUX. It's original, enjoyable, perfectly written (concise & sarcastic), intuitively and clearly organized, fastly accessible, critical about technologies, loaded with expertise and experience. As a student then a computer scientist, I searched and read many and many books. This one truly stands up as the best designed, organized and written, not only for Unix/Linux but in all categories. It has a unique, very original and practical layout: It's a book-magazine-almanac, meaning the reader doesn't have to read lond pages to get information (which requires attention & uses energy) nor follow the chapters. The access to information is the faster possible. It's so true a pleasure that I often read it again, only to be delighted. (The style is ironical and concise.) On a technical standpoint, the organization is clear, with big "natural" topics, well structured, with a progressive approach. The useful knowledge is given immediately, and it's very easy to find an answer to any problem. Besides, it's an excellent tutorial/reference guide to the shell programming, sed, awk, and many others. Even the "theorical" aspects have a very pratical impact. For example, the part linked to the File System & the links explains clearly the concepts, but this helped to, for the first time, really understand the differences and therefore use the most appropriate solution. It's important to know that the book is limited in scope (which is clearly indicated); however, at the difference of others that pretend to cover anything but only stay at the surface, this one really goes deep inside. In addition, even the elements that are not covered have a starting point, allowing the reader to find easily additional data. However, some points are not here, like new interesting features of Bash 2.0, & others. Let's hope the 3rd version will add many more and extend the book's scope. To conclude, if you have one & only one book to choose, UNIX POWER TOOLS is for you.
Rating:
Summary: Essential Resource and Makes UNIX Fun
Review: This book is not a general tutorial, so if that is all you are after, then is not for you. However, if you are a novice or you are an expert, or in between, then this book is an essential resource to have amongst your collection. There are so many useful scripts, tools, and tutorials woven together is different topic areas. There are also a lot of fun stuff thrown in, like how to configure your c-shell prompt to be like the familiar DOS prompt showing directory path. Interestingly, in some parts, I find it to be a good reference and sometimes the only reference for certain tools and commands. For example, this book extensively covered and illustrated the 'find' command, which is very powerful and often used in the industy. There were not only good explanations, but comprehensive examples as well. I could not find any reference of 'find' with examples in any other published book. I think this book gives impressive coverage of other essential, yet seldom, documented tools.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: The power drill on the cover of UNIX Power Tools is very appropriate for this book, which is a collection of articles, various information, and tips on how to more effectively use the UNIX operating system. UNIX is of course a complex OS, and yet even novices can use UNIX after learning a few simple commands. And yet one can also harness much more of UNIX's power by learning its complexities. This book is an excellent reference, showing just how much more useful UNIX can be when you keep learning more about it. It is full of tips and information designed to make your time using UNIX to be more efficient and even fun. With a book of over 1000 pages, there's something on virtually every topic of UNIX here. And you can "jump around" to different parts of the book to learn more about a particular feature or "power tool." Vi for example has always been a favorite of mine, much to the chagrin of some of my friends, and there's a chapter or two of Vi "tricks" to try out. Emacs is a screen editor that I also like, and again there's a chapter devoted to "EMACS tricks." Of course in a book this size, just about everything imaginable regarding the UNIX operating system is covered here, everything from customizing and interacting with your shell environment, to working with files and directories, the UNIX kernel, lots of information about scripting, to security issues. Whether you're a UNIX programmer, sys admin, or "UNIX hobbyist" like me, this book is an invaluable resource.
Rating:
Summary: super
Review: as I recall I read this book from cover to cover and it was an extremely useful book. I highly recommend this book for anyone doing system administration type work or hobby.
Rating:
Summary: Everything I wanted to know; but even more I probably didn't
Review: Have to say it; but if you've been let down by these other books --i.e. going into long beginer tips and how to "set up KDE" and the likes ...... this one book probably has more usefull information than the 31 other books I've collected over the past year or so on the same info .......... BUY IT@!!!!!!
I don't regret it for a second ..... everyday i've had it (about 3 months) i've randomly opened a page and learned something that usually i didn't even know was possible ( and I've been using Unix/Linux for almost 4 years or more -- Linux meaning Slackware, and Unix meaning the BSD's )
I'm rather impressed none-the-less!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Good book2 for Linux Server Hacks!
Review: I received the book at our last meeting and proceeded to read thru it. There is tons of interesting facts and quick fixes for everything that you did not know, But I thought this probably should have been a Book 2 of the "Linux Server Hacks" rather than this. I felt that the authors padded the book with not needed information for the point being made. Overall thou I would recommend this book to my friends and other Linux desktop users.
~Brett~
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