From Bash to Z-Shell: Conquering the Command Line

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Summary: for sysadmins and programmers
Review: Before today's fancy GUIs of every operating system, programmers and sysadmins were restricted to command line programs; totally lacking any UI. Some of you who remember that will have a frisson of retroness about this book.

It concentrates on only 2 shells - bash and zsh, though it does mention briefly other shells, in passing. If you're new to all this, it's a good way to appreciate what you can do outside a GUI. The book's examples are short and simple. None are even remotely 100 lines in length. A quick style of programming that will appeal to some of you. Because you can pragmatically solve certain classes of problems with simple interactions with the operating system.

The book also shows that scripting occupies a middle ground between what sysadmins and programmers do. In this way, you can use the book as an unorthodox career guide. If you are a sysadmin and you find writing scripts enjoyable, it could suggest you try programming in fully fledged languages like C. Conversely, if you are a programmer in one of the latter languages, but you find scripting more fun, perhaps you should be a sysadmin.

Rating:
Summary: Only about bash and zsh
Review: I'm not happy with the deceptive title of this book. It implies that it will cover a range of shells when in fact it only covers bash and zsh. That being said, the coverage of those shells is focused, well written, and useful. In particular the coverage of command line completion, and how to extend it, is excellent. There are two chapters on scripting, but in general this is an end-user book on how to use the shells as opposed to how to automate them. The book could have used some more illustrations, but overall it's an informative read that is well worth the look.

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Summary: The missing manual
Review: The command line was introduced with the first interactive computers, Whereas GUIs are pretty and convenient for many tasks, power users know that only a command line lets you tell a computer exactly what to do. "From Bash to Z Shell" wants to let everybody in on this secret, and it meets its goal admirably.

"From Bash to Z Shell" assumes little about the reader's experience with computers. The first few chapters introduce the concept of a command shell and something of the UNIX philosophy. Don't worry, though, because examples throughout the book show bash and zsh running on Windows. These first few chapters look at the C shell as well as the eponymous shells.

The middle chapters each explore a single important concept like command editing, completion, pattern matching, redirection, and process management. Special features of bash and zsh are introduced in context. I can't stress enough how useful these chapters are: the manual pages for these shells are large but still terse and cryptic. This book manages to provide a conceptual framework into which all of its useful tidbits can be organized and absorbed.

The last few chapters look at scripting: both full blown programs and smaller chunks of shell-customization code. Again, the material here is invaluable: you're not going to get it from the manual pages!

If you work on UNIX systems, or if you'd like to make your Windows environment vastly more powerful, you need this book. I strongly recommend it.

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Summary: Finally, a zsh reference...
Review: This book walks through various aspects of how to use Bash and zsh to do powerful things, with something of a focus on how to configure them. (Thus, you're learning to make your shell environment even more powerful!)

It walks through, in parallel, the way to configure the two shells. I didn't expect this to be useful; I expected that I'd prefer to have more zsh material, and skip the Bashing. It turns out, however, that, in many cases, their parallel development has led to strong parallels in functionality. This is useful because, well, I don't get to install zsh everywhere that I might like to :-).

Somewhat surprisingly, the book waits until right near the end to present the notions of control structures and writing functions. The last two chapters are quite the culmination of the effort; one on functions provides a presentation of script option parsing better than I have seen anywhere; absolutely excellent.

The final chapter, on writing zsh command completion extensions, is similarly wonderful. The reference and online documents are fairly opaque without having a good overview of what you're trying to accomplish. The book provides that overview...

Rating:
Summary: Very useful for bash and zshell fans
Review: When it comes to dealing with the various Linux shells most Linux books devote a single chapter or so to the subject. While this book does cover most of the command line information you need to use a Linux system, its best feature is the extensive coverage of shell scripting and other subjects that generally receive minimal treatment in most Linux books. The authors list internal shell commands and how they are used as well as working with the shell history file. It ends with a section on extending the functionality of the shell based on the items learned in the first two sections. Shell coverage is excellent for the bash and the z-shell and pretty much non-existent for others like the c-shell, t-shell and Korn shell. From Bash to Z-Shell: Conquering the Command Line is one of the best books I've read on the bash and z-shell and is highly recommended to anyone learning to work with either of these two of the most popular of all Linux shells.