Linux Books

What I like best about this book (I only have the 1st edition) is that there are practice exercises and analysis at the end of each chapter. For example, the book will ask you to create some scripts to do a certain task. Or, the questions will show you some scripts and ask you want you need to modify to make it work a certain way. The answers and explanations are in the back of the book in case you get stumped or want to check your answers. Going hands-on is the BEST way to learn scripting and programming!

I found the reading easy to absorb, but I do have a little background in BASIC and Visual Basic programming so it definitely helps. I think a completely new user to the Unix/Linux world would benefit from this book.

Becoming thouroghly proficent in various shells and being able to write shell scripts whether simple or of vast complexity is a fundemental requirement for becoming *NIX savvy. Whatever your flavor, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris - you must know shell scripting to be taken seriously.

The title of this book, "Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours" is no joke. Even if you know nothing of this subject, a couple passes through this book will bring you all the way up to a moderate and respectable level of proficency. While this book only covers a tiny part of a massive skill, you will leave this book with the confidence and the ability to learn more and more without the help of another book. Of course, there are more advanced books out there, and it can't hurt to look, but I STRONGLY reccomend starting here.

I have not used shell scripting in the long time. I ordered this book and it helps me refresh a lot about Unix and shell scripting leanrt in school many years ago as undergraduate student. The book is well-written and will keep you excited. One important thing is: practice as you are reading. By the time you finish the book you should be able to grab much from the book. I downloaded the Sun Solaris 9 that I installed on x86 computer and I am playing with some flavors of shell writing small shell scripts.

I came from purely Windows environment and I know nothing about UNIX or Linux except a few C commands many years ago. I tried a few books like shell scripting, learning the shell and by example, but I gave up as their speed was too fast for a beginner like me. Only after a few intro pages, these books started to write complex commands which I was confused and unable to continue. The worst thing is, most of them don't explain in details what those commands do and expect readers to know. This book does not assume you know basic UNIX commands, and it covers the basics in first section. It has short chapters and each of them tries to teach you the basic concepts in one area with simple examples. This is the book that gives you confidence to move on and it does not try to feed you with too much knowledge at a time. After reading this book, you are equipped with basic idea of what shell scripting is and able to move on with advanced books. A very good step-by-step book for beginners who know very little or nothing about UNIX shell programming.

Very helpful book. I first tried using unix a year ago, it seemed really hard. Now after i read this book i understand how to use most of the commands in the shell terminal even though im only 12 years old! Really.
P.S. : No, I am not a nerd.

This book is for anyone who wants to know what happens "under the hood" in a UNIX based operating system. I especially like the pseudocode given for various system calls and other important kernel functions. The exercises given at the end of chapters are thought provoking. This book is not about how to learn/work in UNIX. Some of the topics such as streams may not be relevant in some of the current implementations of UNIX (or clones of UNIX), but most of the book is still relevant.

Maurice Bach's The Design of the Unix Operating System still holds the place of honor on my technical reference bookshelf. After almost 20 years, it provides a clear overview of basic Unix organization and operations and is a model for how technical books should be written. Readers who complain that the text is dated evidently did not bother to notice the 1986 copyright date. Its age, however, has not diminished its clarity of content or usefulness in understanding the Unix operating system. Bach deserves an award for excellence in technical writing.

I'm something of an OS freak (not an expert though) and I collect OS books. I've read many of the classics of the field but I think this book is the crowning achievement of OS literature. Here are the arguments to support my claim:

a) It does not go into explaining general OS theory, thus all space can be dedicated to explaining the details of one operating system (Unix System V Release 2). This of course makes it unsuitable for begginers as it assumes you have a good understanding of basic concepts like race conditions, mutual exclusion, data structures, etc. If you're a begginer don't buy this book yet; get "Operating Systems - Design and Implementation" by Tanenbaum & Woodhull or "Operating System Concepts" by Silberschatz, Galvin and Baer.

b) It details EVERY algorithm with C-like pseudocode and adds verbal explanations exemplifying operations running through the algorithms. This is unlike other OS books which sometimes just give general descriptions of algorithms with no examples.

c) Explanations are complemented by many diagrams of data structures in various states of manipulation by the algorithms. This is possibly the most valuable feature of the book as it does wonders to help you understand what the kernel is doing; you get to 'see' how the algorithms work. This sets it apart from practically all other OS books I've read that just mention in passing "... then function 'x' manipulates data structure 'y'" and leave you to find out the implications of these manipulations. Diagrams also make the book superior to mere code listings.

d) Each chapter 'uses' the algorithms explained in the previous chapter to explain higher level functionality. This is much unlike other OS books which are just unstructured and make you loose the big picture of how the various pieces fit together. Chapters also start with an introductory overall view of the current topic.

So, what is not to like about this book? The only thing I can think of is that it deals with a 'dead' OS. Unix System V only runs in a handful of computer installations these days (if any), while its derivatives have changed too much to serve as a reference while reading the book. Still, System V binaries and source are available on the internet, legally of course. Search for The Unix Heritage Society archives. If you want to get really hardcore you can even get a PDP-11 emulator and set up Sys V in it. There are, of course, other books that delve into present day operating systems; "Solaris Internals" , for instance.

Also, Unix-haters might point out this is just another book on Unix. Well, unfortunately there are no books that explain, say MS Windows, at this level of detail; blaim MS. But still, while dealing with the specifics of one single OS, you do get a general understanding of how other OS's might work.

In my humble opinion this book is the 'King of the Hill' of OS literature; it has helped me finally understand things like context switching and memory mapping. An absolute feast to read, particularly if you like Unix.

It is one of the greatest books that I have ever read on UNIX. It is a comprhensive yet simple depiction of Unix Operating System. This book is a MUST READ for UNIX / UNIX LIKE Operating System Engineers. It is worth possesing a copy as it can come handy quite regularly. I give it a full go go!

While there may be more detail to be found in "The Magic Garden," or more up-to-date coverage in the likes of Vahalia or Schimmel, Bach's opus is, in the view of this twenty-plus-year UNIX guru, unmatched. I say this because only while reading Bach's book do I experience the sense of philsophic structural perfection, of tool-orientation, of practicality-versus-theoretic-efficiency tradeoff, that characterizes the earliest UNIX monographs (Ritchie, Kernighan, Bourne, Lycklama, Ossana; that sort of thing) that busied me as a freshman. Bach imparts to the reader a glorious--and gloriously holistic--depiction of the structure of the UNIX kernel as a unit. Algorithmic details are provided where appropriate. Exceptionally well thought-out exercises stimulate the reader to extend the textual material where meet. The material is assuredly out of date, but I dare you to critize, say, Lions as being "out of date" (whether or not it describes a 25-year-old, 9K-LOC kernel, it is a scripture of paramount importance, a cornerstone of my computer engineering [n.b.: I didn't say "computer science"] library).

For those who are wont to compare Leffler and Bach--if for no other reason than that they are coevals--I heartily endorse Bach over its competitor. It's nice. It's clean. It's precise. You just couldn't ask for more. And, BTW, stay away from "The Magic Garden." I'm not sure that five hundred pages worth of out-of-context code excerpts, inundating the reader with thousands of kernel variables, accomplishes much by way of imparting conceptual understanding.

(I'm reminded: a customer of mine--an older gentleman with a Ph.D. in physics--once asked me for a concise description of the workings of UNIX, something that introduced the basic concepts at a scholarly but not overweight level. I told him I had a recommendation in mind. "You're going to give me 'The Magic Garden'," John complained; "Don't bother. It stinks!" Was John ever surprised when I pointed him to the third entry in Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems series. It has concise thirty or forty-page entries on UNIX, MS-DOS, and a handful of others. For those who want to know--from a scientist's viewpoint--what the fundamentals of the UNIX OS and superjacent environment are, what it can do, how one navigates within it, etc., at a _conceptual_ level that trucks not with the details of Bach or Leffler, seek ye Tanenbaum II.)

High Performance MySQL opens with a quick chapter describing various MySQL installation options including binary packages and compiling from source code. The next chapter describes the different storage engines available in MySQL and why you would want to choose one over another. This is the book's first hint of what you can do to improve database performance: picking the right table type.

Skilled software developers use benchmarking to gain insight into how their software is performing and database benchmarking should be part of that strategy. A brief chapter introduces some database benchmarking strategies and tools.

Chapters on indexing and query performance follow, describing some of the most important skills to master. Following that, replication and load balancing are discussed. Backup and recovery options are covered, as is the topic of security.

A somewhat thin trio of goodies rounds off the book in the appendices: the SHOW STATUS / SHOW INNODB STATUS commands, the mytop tool, and the phpMyAdmin user interface.

Overall, I found many possible areas for performance improvement that I had not thought of before. At 278 pages, a lot of material is crammed into this book. It's a quick read and if you're a MySQL admin or a developer using MySQL, you're bound to find something useful here!

A great overview of MySQL, with a cursory introduction to virtually every field a DBA will encounter over the years. The book is aimed at someone who has already used MySQL, but does not require in-depth knowledge - it's well written and should serve as a great starting point for further research. Jeremy covers: indexes, engines, query tricks, backup, security, and more. For a seasoned DBA, this book may not offer as much, but for the rest of us, it's a highly recommended read!

Having written LAMP-based web applications, I read High Performance MySQL hoping to gain a deeper understanding of how MySQL operates at a relatively low level and how to deal with ongoing frustrations (especially replication).

I was quite pleased. As others have noted, the book is readable and the authors' tone inviting. While the book does rigorously avoid discussion of low-level implementation details (e.g. "the query is parsed" is left as a black box step in the execution process), this does not detract materially from the message. The chapter on replication is one of the best treatments of this topic I have seen.

I only have a few criticisms. First, there are a number of typographical errors of varying severity, though I understand that the most egregious ones (e.g. in code) have been fixed in newer printings. Second, while the book is titled, "High Performance MySQL," it might be more aptly called, "High Volume MySQL." The contents seem highly directed toward sites that run simple queries against huge tables, neglecting somewhat the many sites (e.g. ecommerce) that may run very complex queries against small to medium size tables, but for which optimization may be just as important. This focus is unsurprising given the lead author's career at Yahoo!, but prospective readers should at least be aware of the bias.

This is an overall solid book, covering all aspects of running a MySQL database, from the impact of various flavors of hardware to architecting database clusters. However, I was expecting more details and insight about configuring and scaling MySQL. What are some of the finer points of implementing database clustering or federation? How does indexing and caching work in MySQL? How much will data fragmentation impact performance? In the end, even though the title suggests it covers advanced topics, I didn't learn much new from this book.

I'm Certified MySQL Associate and preparing for the next exams (Developer and Admin)... and I must say I didn't liked the book.

It offered nothing new for me... so if you're at a high level in MySQL it will not help you that much.

I saw some slides by Jeremy that were by far more informative and compact than the whole book.

To keep it short the complete title should have been: High Performance MySQL for MySQL beginners.

This would be an okay book for my wife if she got interested in the linux command line.

It does not tell you much about setting up your system - but my wife can just get me to do that.

This book is getting old, but for a lot of command line stuff, that doesn't matter much, because it doesn't change a lot. And my wife can ask me whether there is something newer and spiffier.

It does not go into any depth. Things like tunneling a vnc session over ssh - no way it is going to tell you. But my wife doesn't care. And if for some reaswon she needed to open a desktop on a remote system securely, she would ask me to do it for her.

It does not tell you much about GUI tools. My wife does like GUI tools, but she's pretty good at figuring them out.

Its strength is the nice examples. There is never any doubt how to do something that is actually covered. I suspect its coverage of things like postscript and printing would help someone who needed to deal with those at a user level. So if my wife wanted to print out a DVI file, this would be the book for her.

For people like me, who want to know how to make that new printer work right, or start up a secure desktop session on a remote machine, this is not the book. A book with the same title but a different author (Schroeder) does a better job for us.

It's a book for beginners that concentrates on the console commands and programs. It was mostly review for me, and I'm just a novice in Linux. I've been kicking around with it for 6 or 7 years just on a very casual basis (a few minutes a week, really) and I guess I was hoping for something that could advance me to the next stage of understanding, but all it did was reincforce some things I already knew and introduced a few I didn't. Might be a real eye opener for an absolute beginner. In fact I would recommend it to anyone just getting started with Linux to get their feet wet in the console. Pretty good command index to keep at arm's reach.

Let me start with what this book is and is not. There is nothing on how to install, troubleshoot, or administer Linux and it is not supposed to have that information. This is a cookbook and is designed to be a resource when you have a specific goal in mind and want to know how to get there. The first several chapters focus on the very basic Linux information that everyone working in the operating system should know. This includes such common items as how to determine what processes are running and how to determine who you are logged in as. Of course anyone with even a minimum of Linux experience knows this stuff. For the more experienced Linux users the later chapters deal are a real treasure. It includes things like viewing and editing images, PostScript, working with sound, and cross-platform conversions. The recipe style layout really works well. Like a list of ingredients the author lists the program to be run, package manager name for the installation package, and the home page where the package can be found. This is one of the really nice features of the book. If you are looking for how to accomplish a specific task you can look it up, see if there is a program to accomplish it, locate and install the program if necessary, and follow through the specific directions to achieve your desired result. The Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition is very highly recommended for the new Linux user, and recommended as a desk reference to keep available for the more experienced user who may just need to know how to convert that mp3 file to another format and burn the result to a CD.

I AM NOT A GEEK. That said, I'd have to say that this book fell short of providing me any really useful information. I've been a Linux user for about 5 years now, and I still find some aspects of it frustrating, but this book didn't really help me much. And, it certainly doesn't live up to the O'Reilley "Cookbook" series (not that it is pretending to be, just shares the name), which I always find helpful. There are numerous Linux books out there that are better than this one. To me, the hints provided don't help much. And, when I'm stumped about what's going on with my system, this book doesn't help either.

If I were just starting out, maybe it would be OK. But I think I would probably spring for something else, "Unix Power Tools" comes to mind.

When this book fell out of its shipping envelope, it made quite a thunk as it hit my desk. No wonder: at almost 800 pages, this is quite a chunk of reading material.

I had been impressed by the first edition. The only real complaint I had about that was its exclusive focus on Debian Linux; that's been corrected here. The first edition was available on-line in its entirety; this is not, although you can see a sample chapter and the table of contents at (...).

Unlike the first edition, this covers a lot more basic material. Don't let that turn you off if you have outgrown the beginner books - unless you are expert at everything, you'll find helpful material here. There are pointers to esoteric utilities you probably have never heard of mixed in with the "getting started" stuff.

I was interested that Amazon reviews were luke-warm. I think it deserves better. I would have liked to see less attention to the real basics, but that does make this useful to the beginner also. One Amazon review didn't like it because it was too geeky, a complaint I can't sympathise with. Another didn't like the concentration on command line tools - I hope that isn't a sign of things to come where Linux users join their Windows brethren in disdain of character based interfaces.

The book is really a good one. It explains difficult concepts with simple, clear and effective language. The only spot in the book is the uneffective tutorial on sendmail, the mail server of Linux. I think more space and resources should be dedicated to sendmail subject. Anyway this book is another proof of the excellent writer named Craig Hunt.

Although I am still a novice user, I found that this book will improve make my knowledge/skills even better. If you are serious to deploy Linux, buy this

I bought this book after reading the reviews. It is a good book but found that the author has not explained various Linux functions in detail. I think that this book is for advance users of Linux and not for beginers or intermediate. I found "Red Hat Linux 6 Server" by Mohammed J. Kabir to be better informative. I do plan to read this book again in six months and hope that I understand it better.

If this was the only book on Linux, you would eventually figure out how to get a server working, however your server would not survive long in the real world, the section on sendmail is poor, and any real "issues" are avoided by simply not mentioning any real world problems, there are much better Linux books - Email me for a list !

Given time you can find the answers by reading HOWTOs, man pages and DejaNews, or by playing with commands, but who has that kind of time! I run a network with 83 users and over 100 computers. Free time is the one thing I don't have. That's why I love this book. It has the answers and they are easy to find. Everything about a Linux network server is in this book put together in a well organized way without any unnecessary garbage. The book is also well indexed, which I think is important. People who say all books are a waste are full of it. I love books and this is a great one!

This book is a great resource for making sure your scripts are portable and can be run on any unix box. A clear concise set of bourne shell scripts and functions that allow them to be used with any shell from the Bourne shell up thru ksh and bash. This book can be used as a learning tool or a reference book for veteran shell scripters.

I work in different scripting languages so I can never remember which syntax I use for which language. This book is my "go to" book for a quick reference on "what that command looks like" in a shell script.

There are a few just plain stupid omissions though. On page 15 the author introduces the "if" statement with "command-list" as the argument to the "if". A new coder could spend literally several hours figuring out that "command-list" means:

[ "$string1" == "$string2" ]
[ $int1 -eq $int2 ]
[ -f "FileToTestExistenceOf.dat" ]

(Note, there's no entry for "command-list" in the index)

There are a small number of these blantant omissions that almost prevent me from recommending the book. But the rest of the book is so useful, I still recommend it.

[...]

I rely on this book for looking up materials for my daily programming needs of Borne-shell. It has never failed me yet.

This book is jam packed with good Borne-shell examples. Just the examples alone are worth the price of the book in my opinion.

If you want to understand shell scripting, do not pass go, do not collect $200, just buy this book.
It's a classic: readable, useful, concise, illuminating. It teaches
the gleaming core of shell scripting. You won't find all the new Bash syntax
here, and you won't miss it, either; this book teaches you how to write
concise scripts that run anywhere. I recommend it to all my interns and new coworkers.

The scripting and the book are BOTH portable. The book covers all the important elements. Anything you forget is easily found in seconds maybe 1-2 minutes sometimes. It easily fits in any pocket of a laptop bag or backpack or briefcase for the time when you need a well organized shell scripting book at a moments notice. I rarely go anywhere without it.

I read it in one of the book store in three hours. I bought it a month later. It saved me several times. One of the best books I have ever had.

This book contains the answers to almost any question concerning communication, concurrency and threads. All of the included code works fine, but is often ugly. At least the ugly code is available online if you are too lazy to write your own, or type it yourself.
3 stars because this book follows the typical computer book pattern. It's too big. Huge examples and discussion for rarely used features, when a table enumerating specifics would be better. There is alot of fluff, but at least the material is there.

This is the type of book that doesn't leave you with more questions than it answers. It doesn't just discuss the concepts and then you're on your own for coding. It gives you enough code and explanation so that you can implement mutex locks, semaphores, threads, etc. It doesn't force you to go search online for code samples. I refer to this book often, and not just when writing code for Unix.

True, this is a text book. So it has longer examples, and it likes to put "Exercise" for all of its sections. However the book also makes an excellent reference. It was well written, and has nice diagrams to explain things like IO redirection, forking, semaphores and other basic concepts of Unix development. Its dated, and does not talk about some newer IPC capabilities such as in Linux and Solaris 10, but it makes a good introductory book...

Well he fixed all his bugs. He thinks he is in spiral model of life cycle publishing, Good Grief!

Added few more projects which are poorly written, especially project www redirection - chapter 19. When I am paying 60 bucks, I expect some quality content. Oho, well maybe my expectations are more because he is targettng the student community. They are not paying you to read your book but they will download of some p2p file sharing network. We pay so I think I have every right to demand. The difference is obvious when a book is written by academic professor versus a professional software developer with tons of experience.

I would suggest, stick to Richard Stevens, unless you are in that Texas school where he teaches.

I've read this book right after the "Just for fun" by Linus Torvalds, and the approach is somewhat different. "Just for fun" has the light weighted style of a talk show with all the inside details that make the delights of every geek fan. "rebel code" goes beyond this with a global overview of the Open Source/Free Software revolution. Everyone is there!
It also provides a deep view from the perspective of the "survival of the fittest" projects. Popping-up to the light from the mass of ideas just be absorbed on the global wave, or even disappear, all the relevant projects and participants of this movement are accurately contextualized.
This book is a must read for everyone that wants to get to know a bit more of this amazing new world that emerges from the freedom of choice in what concerns information.

A lot is discussed in this book, and I'd agree with Eric Raymond's comment that this is the best history of the open source movement. It starts off from Richard Stallman, GNU and "Free Software Foundation" and goes to the Mozilla foundation and the new trendy name of "Open Source Movement." The best parts are the email excerpts from various mailing lists, which take you back into history when things were still being defined.

Of course, most of the book deals with Linux only but isn't that the best case for hackers?

I ordered this book from Amazon because I had just ordered Linus Torvald's book Just for Fun and this book was also recommended. I am glad I did. Torvald's book was really fun to read and it really created an interest in the Open Source software phenomenon that I have heard about, but had mixed feelings about it for a few years. Rebel Code added to Torvald's account, a rather complete history to the whole phenomenon. The book covered elements that I have heard in the news, but wouldn't have come to mind, like the entry of IBM, the role of Novell, Sun, etc. As each important piece of software was discussed, some seemingly small like GIMP, DNS and Sendmail, the author paused to give a short bio of the author and how they each stumbled into this FOSS world, some quite accidently. There were so many fascinating stories, I am going to hold onto this book.

The book is mainly based on the information collected by the author from various people via e-mail, telephone or personal communication between September 1999 and September 2000, and the interview with Linus Torvalds at a critical juncture in his life, in December 1996, as well as other interviews with key players from the last three years.

The book begins with a story of Richard Stallman, who labored for years to create a Unix-like system, written from scratch that would be free. Hw worked alone at first; then he gradually received contributions from to others, including - thought neither of them knew it in 1991 - Linus, whose Linux program would provide the last major pieces still missing from Stallman's huge software jigsaw puzzle.

The book covers the GNU project from its formal beginning, when in January 1984 Stallman started working on Bison, which was a replacement for Yacc. Having limbered up with this relatively minor task, he moved on to one of the most important. One of the key elements of a Unix system is the C compiler. After an unsuccessful attempt, he returned to Emacs and released GNU Emacs in September 1984. In October 1985 he has founded Free Software Foundation and then proceeded with C compiler and the C library.

The book then describes the biography of Linus, his years at the university and his work on his operating system, his experience with Minix, quite popular at that time in academic area, and fight with Tanenbaum, the author of Minix. The book then brings out the history of the development of Linux in detail.

Besides Linux, this book covers Open Source movement in Netscape, the development of TEX, Perl, Cygnus, etc., and how big companies like IBM adopt Open Source software and contribute to its development.

I would also recommend "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond in addition to this book.

The book gives a complete history of open source development starting from the earlier days of RMS and Linus. The strong point of the book is that the depth of coverage on open source history is unmatchable. My most favourite chapters are the ones that describe the early development of Linux and the history of Perl.

Reading the book gives the impression that author's bias against the RMS-style free-software. Also the author gives enough hints of his dislike for Microsoft's style of proprietary software. And towards the end, as the author starts explaining linux' entry into the corporate place, the book tends to be a bit dragging.

Overall, a must read for any open source enthusiast.

The great thing about this book is that while there is Unix in the world this book will still be fresh. It seems that all the hints are based on standard BSD or SysV Unix and Linux, so it will never be out-dated. Great book, hope to see more like this in the future.

As a unix system administrator for a small company, I also have to be the database admin, the network admin, windows admin, PC tech, web master, programmer of various languages on various platforms, and software support for multiple machines. Well, I do not have time to become a unix expert.

This book greatly helps to bring a person up to speed on how to manage a unix system. It has time saving tricks and tips. I use this book a few times a year, and a lot once I first got it. I think it will help anyone in a position where they have to maintain a mission critical unix system.

Most of the reviews of this product have been spot-on. I have been doing unix for quite some time now and I am an accomplished perl hacker. I picked this book up after reading the reviews, thinking that it belonged in my library, even if I wasnt going to learn too much from it (I often wind up scouring my library looking for references so I can explain something to a friend or co-worker).

I was pleasantly surprised to learn several new things after only reading a few pages of this book. I didn't pick it up and read it front to back, I just looked at the index and started poking around at things I knew I could "brush up on." Well, I learned that I could be using vi macros to save myself time when coding.

Many of the hints and hacks in this book are old Unix advice. This is a good thing for any unix hacker to re-read and re-visit. I definitely recommend this book.

One final note. It is published by Que, and Que normally sucks. I was really disappointed after purchasing it to see that it was a Que book. This book really is a good one, and worth even an Accomplished OReilly snob's reading.

I'm the admin for a primarily HP-UX 10.20 shop ( yes, we'e upgrading to 11.0 soon ) and I find this book quite helpful. It's not an introductory guide or a basic book - it's definitely for the UNIX "tricks" that might not be readily known.

I usually pick it up if a user stumps me with a "can I?" or "how can I?" type of question. It's like a mentor in a book form. I haven't found any of these items in the standard documentation.

For instance, ever wonder how to direct a users temporary area away from /var so if they vi a huge file /var doesn't fill...those type of things are here. Tricks and hints..hacks if you will.

It's a very helpful book.

Best Regards, turtlex.

This book has content, content and more content.

I bought it last year and it since then it hasn't gathered any dust.

The author presents a huge collection of tips and suggestions with real-world experience in a outstanding writing style.

This book is geared for people with at a basic understanding of Unix or Linux.

I would buy this book again and would recommend it to friends and family.

I wish I have a copy I can read on the road.

You can't beat the search feature of this resource. Saves a lot of time!

A programming book in paper can be good, but an electronic version is much better. The ability to search, copy-and-paste makes this bookshelf the best perl reference you can have. All the pages are HTML, so you could put it in your intranet to share it with colleagues. Highly recommended.

O'Reilly have collected some of my favorite books onto one CD. I now find myself using this more than the paper copies of the books!
The search feature is excellent.

The CD is also small enough that you can take it with you if you find yourself working at a different desk.

I am a happy owner of Versions 1 and 3 of Perl CD Bookshelf. I finally decided to purchase a copy of Version 4 in order to have access to Perl Cookbook 2nd edition, Learning Perl Objects, and Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd edition (I already owned the first edition of MRE in hardcopy book form).

I was quite disappointed to find that MRE 2nd edition is in PDF format, not HTML. This is a departure from every other book on these three editions of the Perl CD Bookshelf, and makes it significantly less useful, in my opinion.

One of the features I use extensively on the other CD's is the master index, with links to all books on the CD. The master index on Version 4 does not include any links to MRE 2nd edition. The search engine also does not include any capability to include MRE in its results.

I did not see any mention of this change in the promotional material about Version 4, making this loss feel like somewhat of a bait and switch.

Bill Starr
Mon, 20 Jun 2005, 4:45pm EST