Rating: 
Summary: Can't Live Without It
Review: O'Reilly has become the de facto for techie books. They are immensely helpful when you just want to dig your feet in and get hardcore with coding. They make for easy reads. Examples are practical and clear.I find this book to be a great reference tool when working on the Unix command line in the Bash Shell environment. I highly recommend this book if not for reading purposes but as an excellent source of feedback if you are not sure what commands you should be using. Whilst you do have manpages, which are often handy, this book brings you clarity and elaboration when coding may not come to you that easy as it does for others. Learn Bash without bashing your skull on the keyboard in frustration.
Rating: 
Summary: Most disappointing O'Reilly book I've bought
Review: The authors spend so much space on extended examples that they make the basics difficult to find. The odd appearance of conditionals is, for instance, the most surprising thing about bash, at least for csh users; their explanation of it is separated by several pages from the main discussion.
Rating:
Summary: Short on reference material and real world examples.
Review: This book does provide some help for BASH beginners, but lacks reference material and real world examples of BASH Shell programming. Any programming book SHOULD include real world examples OR complete reference material to be considered quality material. This book does NOT make the grade
Rating:
Summary: Good Introduction
Review: This book is a good introduction to the Bourne-Again Shell for those absolutely new to it. The book assumes that you already know how to use the basic UNIX utilities, like cat, grep, find, and so on, and it does not attempt to teach them to you, but I think a chapter on them may have been helpful for those just coming to use the bash shell. Configuration tips, syntax and scripting examples make the book a very useful aid to one trying to become comfortable in the Linux world. Nothing spectacular, but it gets the job done.
Rating:
Summary: Good explanations, but lacking decent examples
Review: This book is aimmed at beginners, but goes into enough depth to get you truly on your way. It explanations of commands, and concepts are very clear and concise. Also, I like how the authors initially in the book go over and explain commands several times, as this makes remembering the syntax of commands much simplier (for someone with bad memory, like me). One criticism is the lack of decent examples, when they are given. All the examples seem to be oversimply or non-real-world, and I feel the authors could make concepts clearer by including more examples. To sum up, this is not a book for you if you learn by trial-and-error and examples, but if you don't mind the lack of decent examples, then this book is a good unix shell programming book.
Rating:
Summary: Recommend highly!!!
Review: This book is an excellent resource for Linux-literate individuals. I use it to tutor students and adults on Bash shell programming. For beginners, it may be too difficult, but the people with hands-on experience will appreciate its content of the each chapter. It lacks real-world examples but with imagination and creativity, you can easily drum up a number of viable samples. This book is not for people who need to be spoon-fed.
Rating:
Summary: Good intro to bash shell
Review: This is a good place to start if you are looking into using the bash shell (unix). The book provides clear cut explanations of all of the commands present in the bash shell. The lack of examples is tolerable, though a little annoying when thoes ever-present half-understandings pop up and a quick example would clear it right up. Making up your own and testing it out works though. Unfortunately the shell scripting/programming part has been rendered rather useless by the up and rising use of perl for shell scripting. The sections still cover it, but most people scripting for unix shells are using perl because of its simplicity and power. Overall this is a great book to teach yourself the basics of the bash command line interface in unix, probably the best bash book out there.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Bash reference
Review: This is a great introduction to the Bash shell.
Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Good Intro To Bash Use; Lacks Robust Code Examples
Review: This O'Reilly Publication does a good job in filling a void for a good introduction to Bash Shell scripting. Bash has become the shell script programming choice for most Unix and Linux shell programmers, because of its strengths over C shell (Csh) and other Unix-based Shell environments as a fairly robust freeware script programming language. Strengths of the publication are the clear explanations of the bash shell programming environment, the effective use of tables to summarize basic shell language and programming constructs, UNIX-based utilities, shell environment customization, shell Syntax, Bash File Operators and control key definitions. A chapter is devoted to edit mode capabilities (both eMacs and Vi Command-Line Editing Commands are covered and summarized effectively in clearly doucmented tables). The book contains a number of terse script programming tasks, which provide clear examples of the material presented in the text. These program examples are reworked to provide a clear example of how Bash scripts can be modified to provide greater flexibility and reusability of Bash shell program code. I would like to see more robust programming shell examples in the book as examples of mini-applications, which Bash is frequently used for in many Unix-based or Unix-derived platforms. The "Task 5-1" program example is an example where a good example of a program, which does an adequate job of clearly covering the use of Bash File Operators, yet the author(s) make the statement that the code is "relatively long winded". Another area the book could address is the use of Bash in a Windows environment. I was able to port some of the programming tasks presented to a Windows 95/98 environment using the GNU Bash Version 2.03 for Windows package available on the internet. Despite these drawbacks, I rate the book four stars on the strengths that it is the only readily-available publication, which is solely devoted to Bash shell use and programming. The O'Reilly publication is definitely worth the investment, if you are looking for a book to get you started on Bash Shell Script programming on a Unix, Linux or Windows (to a limited degree) environment.
Rating:
Summary: Good Intro To Bash Use; Lacks Robust Code Examples
Review: This O'Reilly Publication does a good job in filling a void for a good introduction to Bash Shell scripting. Bash has become the shell script programming choice for most Unix and Linux shell programmers, because of its strengths over C shell (Csh) and other Unix-based Shell environments as a fairly robust freeware script programming language. Strengths of the publication are the clear explanations of the bash shell programming environment, the effective use of tables to summarize basic shell language and programming constructs, UNIX-based utilities, shell environment customization, shell Syntax, Bash File Operators and control key definitions. A chapter is devoted to edit mode capabilities (both eMacs and Vi Command-Line Editing Commands are covered and summarized effectively in clearly doucmented tables). The book contains a number of terse script programming tasks, which provide clear examples of the material presented in the text. These program examples are reworked to provide a clear example of how Bash scripts can be modified to provide greater flexibility and reusability of Bash shell program code. I would like to see more robust programming shell examples in the book as examples of mini-applications, which Bash is frequently used for in many Unix-based or Unix-derived platforms. The "Task 5-1" program example is an example where a good example of a program, which does an adequate job of clearly covering the use of Bash File Operators, yet the author(s) make the statement that the code is "relatively long winded". Another area the book could address is the use of Bash in a Windows environment. I was able to port some of the programming tasks presented to a Windows 95/98 environment using the GNU Bash Version 2.03 for Windows package available on the internet. Despite these drawbacks, I rate the book four stars on the strengths that it is the only readily-available publication, which is solely devoted to Bash shell use and programming. The O'Reilly publication is definitely worth the investment, if you are looking for a book to get you started on Bash Shell Script programming on a Unix, Linux or Windows (to a limited degree) environment.
| 
