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Summary: I spent years looking for this book!
Review: My favorite way to learn, especially with things like scripts, is to take a working example and adapt it to my needs. I get to see how things work but be productive at the same time. I recently had a need to take some existing scripts and translate them across shells. While many things are very different between shells it's usually the subtle things that screw me up. Not with this book! Being able to see the same process handled similarly across multiple shells heads off a multitude of problems. This book is especially useful for beginners, but I think it is useful at all levels of ability. How many commands and syntaxes can YOU keep straight across 3 or more shells at a time? I have and use separate books on sed, grep and awk, but I always grab this book first.
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Summary: Outstanding Book. A must for learning shell programming.
Review: Several of my fellow system engineers bought this book and they loved it. I purchased this book about three weeks ago and I have not put this book down! There are still several typos in the examples, but, like all programmers and engineers know, debugging is part of the job. In all honesty, fixing and tweaking the examples is actually fun. I strongly recommend creating the labs at the end of the chapter. These exercises will solidify your knowledge.
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Summary: Learning by example
Review: The 'Unix Shells By Example' is a well-known book in the field of shellscripting. It has about 640 pages with a CD-ROM included. The book is well edited, with good white-spacing and clarity in layout. Having taught the unix shells for over 15 years, the author really knows her stuff, and the text is factual and to the point.The index seems complete and one doesn't have a difficulty in finding the right info one is looking for. These properties should be normal for books, but computer books seem often an exception.The chapters deal about the central unix-commands for scripting (Grep, AWK,SED) and the big three shells (korn, bourne and C-shell). The author explains the subject in great detail by showing examplescripts. First you're given the data or text to be edited, then the script or commandlines and finally a lenghty line-by-line explanation of the scriptsyntax. The subjects of the scripts range from explaining the basic unix-commands to complex intertwining regular expressions, functions, obscure nawk options etc. The author also touches the subject of shell-history, making comparisons of the three shells, giving 'lab-exercises' and some unix background about commandtypes,login and inheritance. The apparent subject that is missing in this book is the Bash shell, the preferred shell in the Linux community. However, a seperate book on this subject is available (Linux Shells By Example). As with all books that have an extensive coverage of the subject, this book too can be overwhelming for the absolute beginners in shellscripting. It takes some time before one writes sytax like: nawk -F: 'BEGIN{printf("What vendor to check?");\ getline ven <"/dev/tty"};$1 ~ ven\ {print"Found" ven "on record no" NR}' vendor Instead of searching the pages for the basics, beginners should consider buying an entrylevel book. Conclusion: For the intermediate scripter who visits shellsites like shelldorado and lurks newsgroups in search of advanced programming constructs to steal this book is a great find. You won't be left with a feeling that you'll outgrow this book. For newcomers in scripting this should however not be the first book to buy, they're better of with titles like "learning shellscripting in 24 hours". But once through these 24 hours, this book can only be warmly recommended.
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Summary: Frustrating to find what you're looking for.
Review: The index is way out of sync with the actual pages. Just try finding the rm command on page 620 as the index says it's located. In fact, all the UNIX commands I was looking for were not on the page they were said to be by the index. It is very frustrating trying to find an example for something you want to do when the index sends you on a wild goose chase. The examples I was able to track down were very helpful, but finding them was quite a chore. I wish I could get my money back from this book. I waste more time trying to find the right example than the time saved by writing the script is worth. It would be faster to do it by hand. Ellie would do well to find another editor/publisher.
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Summary: After a few minutes I found several "typo's."
Review: The URL (http://www/Prenhall.com/register is bad (and this book was just published!)
Appendix A, page 583, the IP address in "Example 2" and the IP address in "Explaination 2" are different. No explaination was given.
I like the way the material in this book was presented. The author did a very good job of explaining, by example, the concept and purpose of these important UNIX utilities.
David R. Graves
3090 Peoria Ave
Simi Valley, CA 93063-1653
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Summary: If your new to Sed, Awk, Shells, Read This Book
Review: Then, when you get it, if it confuses the heck out of you, you'll know it is for you. Put the sample files on your machine, and type in the sed, awk (nawk or gawk) grep, egrep, and all the other examples she'll lead you through. If through nothing else than osmosis and repetition, you will start to hear things click together. By the time you finish this book, you'll at a minimum, be confident enough to rip one of her many examples, and apply it to your needs. Ellie knows how to teach basic subjects to beginners in a manner they can comprehend. If your a beginner to Linux, shells, sed, grep, awk, etc, this is YOUR book, if you ever want to exceed the DOS Batch file prison.
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Summary: Great reference, but with some errors
Review: This book is awesome. I am a command-line Unix geek by trade, but hadn't written a line of programming of any kind since BASIC in high school. I sat down with this book and, with the help of a few Google searches, was writing solid Korn Shell scripts in a week. With this book I was able to write an awk routine (my first one ever) that cut a job one of my co-workers was doing from 3 hours down to five minutes. I would recommend this as a must-have if you learn to do stuff by example. If you are looking for an O'Reilly-type desk reference, this is not your book. I have one MAJOR gripe about this book, the index is very sloppy for information contained in the last 1/4 of the book, it looks like the index didn't get updated right after and edit....
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Summary: Typing by Example
Review: This book is probably the best book to take up shelf space in your cube if you use sed, awk, and grep with shell programming on a day to day basis. The format of this book is awesome, the examples are more often than not extremely useful, and it uses a style that other books should definately borrow. As a guru that writes manuals too, I have to say that this is exactly the kind of book that a knowledgable user should own. I think what most of the typo watchers out there are really afraid of is that the understanding a book like this provides to the topics discussed, will make these so called 'gurus' more mainstream and force them to actually develop some people skills. Quit whining about the typing, its the best book for understanding Unix programming there is.
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Summary: Highly Overrated. Full of Errors and Confusing.
Review: This book was a brilliant concept with a horrible execution. It is filled with typographical and substantive errors. In the first chapter alone (I have the 3rd edition) there are examples that are simply wrong (chsh command and /etc/shell[s] file on page 3), incomprehensible (Figure 1.8 on page 18), incorrectly marked (section 1.4.4 on page 15), incomplete (Example 1.6 on page 16-17), or confusingly repetitive (explanation of pipes on page 19). Then the book suddenly presents a script written for 3 different shells, using a bunch of commands that are only vaguely explained. These explanations and descriptions of the scripts do not always match the source code, which is also different in the book and on the CD. And to top it all off the supplied source code on the CD is numbered incorrectly! For example the shell scripts for chapter 11 are located in the chapter 13 directory on the CD! The errors continue. In chapter 2 on page 32 the regular expression examples contain several typos that made a difficult subject almost impossible to understand. The chapters on shell programming alternate from being incomprehensible to superficial. The author can not seem to decide if the book is a reference, a book of examples, or a book to teach and explain shell scripting. In trying to write a book that is simultaneously all three she winds up achieving none of these adequately. The index is lousy, and often incorrect. I had to look to other books and sources to straighten myself out. I strongly recommend that users of this book buy or borrow several other books on Unix and Shell Scripting to help make sense of this mess. A fully corrected and thoroughly edited version of this book could be a masterpiece. (An errata sheet would not be enough as there are too many corrections to make and that would make the examples even harder to read and understand.) But as it is this book is worse than useless. None of the information in it can be trusted without cross-checking and testing.
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Summary: Three shells plus grep, sed and awk in one place!
Review: This books is great--the three most popular shells, and the regular expression manipulation tools as well, all in one place. I've recently changed from using csh to using ksh, and finding examples of how the syntax is handled in the new shell has been invaluable. My boss now thinks I'm a shell programming wizard! The best thing about this book is that it is compiled from the author's coursework. These examples have all been tried in classes through the UC Extension, and they're designed to teach students at various levels of expertise. I've been a unix system administrator for several years now and I use this book on a regular basis. I recommended this book to a novice sys admin who had never written a script before, and he was able to get started quickly using this as a reference. Some books just seem to make your job easier. This is definitely one for me.
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