Unix Systems Books

I wanted to make a PowerPoint presentation without buying the software from Microsoft. Some pieces of information I needed for using the OpenOffice.org "Presentation" software were not in this book. Some I had to figure out by myself. That was a very frustrating and confusing process. Finally, I turned to the on-line OpenOffice.org user's forum and got what I needed. The authors admit terminology in the book is not consistent because materials have been contributed by many authors. That can cause problems.

The book comes with an early version of the OpenOffice.org software. Currently newer software with more features is available for free download. The usefulness of the disk that comes with the book is now limited, unless one wants to use the earlier version of the software, but that misses some nice features, like easy conversion of a text document to the PDF format.

Still, the book probably was a help to me. I did finally get my PowerPoint presentation made.

I met Solveig at Comdex this week and was very happy to see that she's written a book for OpenOffice.org. I've been making some progress learning the program on my own but it is clear already that I was doing it the hard way. Already since getting the book I have learned how to do repeating headings on spreadsheets, complex running headers in Writer files, and hyperlinked TOC entries. I have found everything I looked for. I think it's a good idea for any OpenOffice.org user to get the Resource Kit. You've already saved a lot of money on the software, and this book is worth every penny.

My company is changing us over from Microsoft to OpenOffice and they let us get some of these books to help out learning the program. I like the book a lot since it's easy to find what I want to know and easy to understand it. It's also good when you think something's kind of odd in the software since it says yeah, it's weird but this is how it works.

Knowing that it's mostly intelligent, clear-thinking people who will be willing to venture outside the for-your-own-good totalitarianism of Microsoftland, the authoress efficiently plots you a straight-line course to mastery of the product. She doesn't waste your time telling you where to find the File menu, or, at the other extreme, how to parse the source code. Her revivifying doses of occasional wit are actually amusing - unlike the Borscht Belt shtick found in the "For Dummies" volumes. And there's no bullstuff either. One section is aptly titled "How To Turn Off Annoying Features". And when she finds the DirectCursor feature more of a menace than an asset, she tells you in plain words to avoid it. Even the page layouts are refreshingly sane and uncluttered. I'm actually reading the thing cover-to-cover, believe it or not.

Best computer instruction book ever?

The book is good. It got my blood pressure up, though, when they spent the first 164 pages telling me how to install, migrate from other office suites, etc. Then finally we got to the OOo instructional material. I think most readers are not getting their very first exposure to OOo with this book. As a free application, most will have poked around in an installation of the free OOo and then decided to buy a book. For that reason, I feel they didn't spend much time thinking about their audience. Ok to start with kudos to the application, but then get to the meat of OOo. Don't waste my time plowing through a bunch of stuff I have already handled with the help fiies of the free download! Notwithstanding the books good content, I feel the authors and publishers deserve a slap to wake them up for the next edition.

this book covers all of modern open source license which i wanted to know. also, it explain them very easy understanding way.

People don't realize how important licensing is with open source, but there is a lot.

Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing is a very needed book and well written.

Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing
Andrew M. St. Laurent
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/

When sharing with others that I was reviewing an O'Reilly book through their User Group & Professional Association Program, the first question was always the same: "What book are you reviewing?" After saying the title was "Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing", responses ranged from "What's that?" to "Well, you won't have any trouble sleeping!" One might think that this list of people included relatives and coworkers who were not attuned to the open source community and its issues. On the contrary, the responses came from those within my circle of acquaintances that include software developers, system administrators, and even an intellectual property lawyer. Licensing is not exactly the sort of topic where people slide forward in their seats and ask to be told more. Such is the appeal of software licensing; however, the importance of understanding licensing, particularly within the context of open source development, cannot be overstated.

Those familiar with the O'Reilly product offerings have no doubt seen or purchased one or more their Pocket Reference series (http://pocketrefs.oreilly.com/). They are not comprehensive references, but rather convenient guides for a specific topic to provide the sort of information one is not likely to have committed to memory, particularly as the trend of having cross-disciplined technologists continues. This book could be considered the analog of pocket guides for open source and free software licensing. Open source licenses and their legal interpretation are subject matter that easily warrant a "pocket reference" that is a full-sized book of nearly 200 pages.

Frankly, reading through a software license and maintaining a reasonable level of comprehension is a rather tough job. The author manages to make the task far more bearable and fruitful at the same time; a difficult balance to strike. The pace of the annotation works well to break up the various licenses (twelve in total) into bite-sized chunks. Chapters 2 and 3, which address the BSD/MIT family of licenses and the GPL/LGPL/MPL family of licenses respectively, each end with a section titled "Application and Philosophy" that serves as a sort of reward for making it through the license and establishes a touchstone to summarize and provide meaningful context for what has been covered.

The annotations of the different licenses are a great introduction, but the book should not be considered as a complete reference for open source licensing issues. The book seems to affirm this at points where the author indicates that particular topics fall outside the book's scope, even to the point of recommending experienced legal counsel for certain issues. It also has a wonderful collection of footnotes and reference to other resources to allow the reader to flesh out topics of interest beyond the focus of this work.

One subtlety of the book that should not be missed is how the history of the open source movement is woven throughout the book to provide the context in which these licenses came into being and were modified to accommodate the vibrant, emerging world of open development models. The book's last two chapters bring that context to the foreground, fully developing the consequence of the licenses in daily development activity. It is far too easy to view these licenses and as mere legal documents that exist in and of themselves; the author reminds us that these licenses are the manifestations of a spirit of selfless contribution and work toward social good made possible by the considerable sacrifice of quite gifted individuals. For those passionate about the open source and free software movements, the section of chapter 7 titled "Models of Open Source and Free Software Development" is a poignant and stirring encapsulation of the first years of the GNU and Linux projects and the work that brought them into being. The cliché rings true; we do indeed "stand on the shoulders of giants."

The number of editorial errors involving misspelled and/or missing words seemed relatively high; this is a trend that seems to have developed in technical books in recent years, to a point that the technical community has come to accept it as some sort of side effect of the rapid pace with which books must be produced in order to keep pace with the rate of change. Given that this is an issue present in other works as well as this one, it should not particularly count as a mark against the work, but rather serve to underscore an issue publishers should consider improving.

"Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing" is a book which strikes a balance between completeness of subject matter coverage and manageability of size. Given the amount of attention the average open source user or developer has given to licensing, reading this book would be a considerable improvement. This book is recommended for a couple of audiences. First, it serves as a great foundation for developers either active in or contemplating participation in open source development. Searching most any open source mailing list for the term "license" can usually turn up some of its hottest flame wars. If most developers had this introductory level of understanding about the main open source licenses, hundreds of message threads arguing about licensing could be avoided.

A second audience for this book is the project manager and/or CTO in most corporate IT shops. Most corporate projects are making use of numerous open source libraries and frameworks. This is particularly true with J2EE, but also with .Net as a number of .Net counterparts to popular J2EE resources arise, e.g. NAnt, NUnit, etc. This book can dispel unnecessary apprehension regarding the use of these libraries that often arises from fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) propagated in much of the mainstream technology media. It can also equip managers to make informed decisions about team members' potential contributions to open source projects and the potential legal implications.

I am an attorney who does open source software license work for a living. When this book came along, I picked it up, mostly because I was interested in seeing how O'Reilly does branching out well beyond its usual technical subjects. As you are probably aware, 2004 was the year of open source, according to some publications. Well, it was also the year of open source books. I have seen at least five that deal with the topic directly.

Getting to the merits of St. Laurent's book, I struggled with whether to give it three or four stars. You see, even as a lawyer I found it lacking in clarity and flow. Overall, I am opposed to the route he took in excerpting almost every term of each license and then providing exposition of his own that was a lot of times hardly more helpful than the original license language. A better approach to explaining the licenses can be found in Larry Rosen's wonderful book "Open Source Licensing." However, this downside becomes an upside when using the book as a reference, instead of an educational guide (justifying the fourth star). St. Laurent's approach here is useful for going into more depth on a particular license. Perhaps that was the goal all along.

Another advantage this book has over Rosen's is its broader treatment of the growing array of licenses and license types. St. Laurent covers more licenses and for that I am thankful. In the end, I would recommend having a copy of both Rosen's and St. Laurent's book handy. And whatever you do, skip Rod Dixon's "Open Source Software Law."

Software licensing can be one of the most confusing issues of software installation and development. Most people assume that there are few if any issues with Open Source and Free Software Licensing but that often is not the case. While it may be free to install you wade into murky waters when you change the code, make a new program that uses some of the coding of the open source program, make a derivative program, or a host of other situations. Part of the confusion is that all Open Source or Free Software licensing is not the same. For example there are the MIT, BSD, Apache, and Academic Free Licenses. Or what about the GNU license? Most people don't realize that there are two different versions of GNU licenses, the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)? Then there is the Mozilla Public License, Q Public License, Artistic License, and Creative Commons License.

Author Andrew M. St. Laurent does an excellent job explaining all these various licenses, what you can do and can't do, the various benefits and shortcomings of the licenses and pitfalls to watch for. If you are doing development in this arena, have made an improvement to one of the programs, or have written a program for internal use that might have resell value you can't afford to not understand the nuances of the various licensing agreements. Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing is highly recommended and required reading for anyone in this situation.

This book doesn't theoretically require one to know anything about programming. Still, it is quite helpful to have experience with some programming language, since comparisons with other languages (particularly C) are pretty frequent and often used to explain certain concepts.
More than that, experience with the UNIX/Linux environment definitely helps.

The book starts off with a basic review of some useful shell commands (from ls to grep passing thru regular expressions). It then goes on to explain how to link these commands together (pipes, variables, loops etc.) to make useful scripts to handle common and not too complicated system administration tasks.
At the end of the book there also is a quite useful summary of shell commands which works as some sort of reference.

The writing style is clear, and attention is paid to warn the user from falling in common syntax errors such as misuse of quotes, and how and why they can lead to results quite different to those one would expect.
The main drawback i found, is that the examples presented are most of the times way too simple. That can surely help people with little confidence in programming, but may bore people that do already have programming knowledge and wish to be introduced to more complex tasks more rapidly.

All in all, i surely like this book, both for how things are explained and for how they are organized. And it surely is high quality for the price. I wouldn't recommend it to an experienced programmer, which might be better of with a more technical approach, but if you fall anywhere between 'noob' and 'competent programmer' you will probably enjoy reading this book before you move on to something more advanced.

This third edition is still based on the classic UNIX shell programming book Kochan put out in the late eighties. The benefit of this edition is that it includes POSIX standard support for constructs supported by the Bash and Korn shells. It is no longer restricted to the Bourne shell.
There are many thoughtful insights appearing throughout the book, which makes it an excellent reference book. If using it as a text book, it is a little slow getting into the actual programming; you may find yourself bogged down in regular expressions that are covered in chapter 4.
Overall, this is one of the better books I have seen on Shell Programming.

I was recently thrown into the world of Unix at work. Like most people I was a windows programmer/user and didn't even know what Unix was. After reading the reviews, I picked this up and must say its the very best book on programing I've ever read. I have books on XML, XSLT, SQL SERVER, VB, C# and more, but none of this books taught be faster than Unix Shell Programming, Third Edition. This is a must have for the beginner!

Highly recommended.

This book is good, actually quite good, but for a beginner. The reason of the title and four stars is, for a beginner, I would still recomend the gold standard, age old "The UNIX Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Pike, the first five chapters (unless you know decent amount of C). If it comes to writing portable shell and also getting an introduction to Awk, the other two books are far better. No offenses to Stephen Kochan, I am a fan of his C book.. !

I wish this was the book we used last quarter since it is MUCH better. It is this quarter's UNIX / Linux textbook (Shell Scripting although it also covers the basic commands) This book is highly reccomended for the Linux beginner or for someone who wants a very good reference book.

Well worth the money, explains things very well, the questions are thought provoking and very well done.

I would have given it 5 stars if not for the poor quality of the binding--the book COMPLETELY fell apart. This also happened to several other students in my class--very annoying after I paid $100 for it.

McGrawHill sent me another one after I complained loudly.

this is a great reference book, it explains clearly how to do basic things in unix without confusing the hell out of you. one of the only books i'm keeping after the course was over.

After reading the reviews prior to buying this book, I was very skeptical on how awesome this book trully was. After getting the book I have already read 100 pages, and I am here to say that the author starts from the beginning and he works his way to the more indepth advanced depths of UNIX. I would say that this is probably the best book I have read, and I have alot on UNIX and Solaris, and to me this book encapsulates the knowledge needed for someone who is starting out in UNIX right up to a programmer or administrator. I would strongly recommend this book for anyone who has to use UNIX either in college or at a job. This book will help you from basic essentials to advanced knowledge and theory.

I did not find in this book anything that may justify its price. It is a general book on UNIX that repeats the same things like any of FREE pdf books by GNU project or "UNIX for dummies" that is 6 times less. The book is also full of mistakes, and on some subjects it's plain wrong. To spend this kind of money you can find much better options out there.
After reviewing most of the ecstatic reviews on this book I conclude they are fake.

This book is very easy to read and understand. Every section clearly explains the topic and offers plenty of fully explained examples. I find this book an excellent reference for the basics of using the command line, shell scripting, sed and awk. Unlike most textbooks, this will not bore you with heaps of theory--you can use it as a tutorial and to try out the examples as you read. I use linux daily and find almost everything in the book applicable.

This is the best DNS book I have read to date for supporting Windows 2000 DNS. If you can only afford one book on Windows 2000 DNS , this is the one to have, Paul and Cricket's knowledge and experience with DNS and Bind far exceeds all others!

Jose Medeiros, Instructor - San Jose City College, MCP+I, MCSE, MCT, Vice President- NT Engineering Association, www.ntea.net

I needed to get a grasp on DNS generally, and was told "DNS and BIND" was the best book existing. Unfortunately it was too fat a book for me. It spent too much time on BIND which was of no interest for me. Luckily I dicovered a slimmer version called "DNS on Windows NT" by the same authors. A fresh MCSE on NT4, I was really happy for this title. Full of expectations I started reading. And I was not dissapointed. It was like finding an easily accessible gold mine. So if you need knowledge on DNS generally, or on DNS on Windows NT4 specifically, don't hesitate. Buy this book!

Last several days I was seriously thinking about setup a MS DNS for my LAN. I could only found very little information on the internet about set up a MS DNS. But this book helped me to fulfill what I looked for. Especially CNAME & MX records.

More than I ever wanted to know about DNS! I purchased this book in preparation for Win2K Active Directory and DDNS- anyone planning a companies name space needs to have a thorough understanding of DNS. In the absence of a Win2K DDNS guide book I read DNS on Windows NT and it was worth the time. Chapter 4 is all you need to setup a NT 4.0 DNS server, but the book goes way beyond the basics. It thoroughly covers subdomains, advanced features, troubleshooting and nslookup. Also, if you never really understood the in-addr.arpa domain, you will after this book. With the knowledge gained from this book, I know I am better prepared for DDNS and Active Directory.

This book is straightforward yet concise. I had no experience whatsoever with DNS before purchasing this book and now have all my DNS servers up and running with no problems. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who needs to set up a DNS Server on NT fast and effictively.

OS X UNIX is amazingly friendly and accessible. Some people who had never used it before type commands and work with the operating system directly as a "cool guys" in movies! This book is very helpful and well written and it is serves as a very nice reference. I paired this book with that "UNIX Essentials" DVD I found here on Amazon and it is complete UNIX course recorded and this book and a video they contribute one another greatly. The book is very particular about the subjects that related to OS X and because there are some differences between OS X and other UNIXes it is nice to have a book that deals with it.

There are many Tigers left in this Leopard world, and you'll want this book if you're going to tame the big striped cat via Unix. Especially valuable for Unix developers and administrators that are new to the Mac OS, "Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks" illuminates Apple's unique approach to Unix and provides a jump-start into using the Mac OS's GUI and command-line tools. Authors Brian Jepson and Ernest E. Rothman lift the hood and point out the function of Tiger's major parts: the startup process, the filesystem, directory services, and the tools to use when configuring these parts. They proceed to detail Tiger's application development framwework, comparing and contrasting it with traditional Unix frameworks. The book finishes with an overview of Tiger as a server OS, replete with notes on major server technologies: administration tools, and databases and scripting languages. Jepson and Rothman share so much knowledge, you'll think they're developers for Apple!

I was a bit worried that the book would be more for beginners, but have been pleasantly surprised. I have been scripting on Linux and Unix machines for years and this is a great book for those who like working under the hood.

This book isn't for the average geek - if you're a geek but not a UNIX geek then don't buy this book. Even if you are a Unix geek the book is of potentially less value than you might expect... so let me adjust your expectations a bit.

Short and simple: it isn't a "Tiger Unix Bible". The majority of topics are just touched on or in many cases merely mentioned.

It also isn't a detailed coverage of Unix topics specific to Tiger. Apple has quite a few technologies of their own that they have woven into this flavor of UNIX. One might think that the book would cover at least those in depth. Nope. Even 10.4 specific topics that would be new to a 10.3 geek are typically "mentioned in depth". Assuming knowledge of Unix is one thing - but this book seems bent on assuming knowledge of the very topics it intends to introduce. That's probably just a fancy way of saying it covers a lot of geeky topics rather lightly.

If you're a true Unix geek you know how to deceipher man pages, hit all the usual blogs and find the information that's missing. And it's a lot easier to do if you know what the topics, commands and keywords are that you need to look at. For pointing me in the right direction I've found this book useful. Just don't expect more.

Excellent. Very helpful. And even if you are a real geek who prefers to look up the man pages, or consult mailing list archives, you shouldn't dismiss this book too quickly. It covers the basics and goes on to less obvious matters. No matter how expert you already are, the chance is high that you shall find a great deal of useful material here.

Dont be fooled by its size, this book has been a tremoundos help, It is great if you dont know anything on Mac's. I have been able to do and set up thing's on my macbook I could not have done on my own. This is a book that should be in your colection. Go to Barnes and Noble and check it out for yourself, than come back to Amazon and get it way cheaper, you wont be sorry. Again this book is small but packs a punch of info.

This book is an easy to carry around very good quisk reference for
setting up and using the OSx Tiger operating system.
The book covers most issues quite well.
Small enough to carry in your laptop case.

This is a quick reference book, small and compact. It would be excellent for the first time Mac user. Something to quickly review and get started right away on the Mac. I would even reccomend it for age 12 and up.
For the first time adult Mac OS X user I would suggest something else like Max OS X by David Pogue.

This book accomplishes it's task - that is to be a quick guide to the Mac OS X. It has many tips and keyboard shortcuts. It touches on a lot of subjects, but it doesn't go into any detail; for that, you'll have to look elsewhere. I found the book easy to read and helpful. I'm keeping it in my laptop bag, right next to my macBook. But I'm also purchasing an additional book to get a more in-depth understanding of Mac OS X.

This is not a beginners book. If you are looking for a book that explains how to double click or what an icon is, look elsewhere. The primary audience for this book is someone who is familiar with the Mac and wants to learn all the tips, tricks, and idiosyncricies of Tiger. This is the type of book someone working in a computer lab or at a help desk would turn to when you need a quick answer to a question. Every IT department should have a copy of this book available.

One of the greatest aspects of the book is Toporek's tables of keyboard shortcuts in every section. I generally like keeping my hands on the keyboard and every time I move to the mouse, time is wasted. If there is a way to do something, anything on the keyboard in Tiger, Toporek tells you. I found myself writing little post-it notes of shortcuts I never knew and now can't live without.

The book is extremely comprehensive, not just covering the Finder, but also applications and utilities, Unix, networking, and troubleshooting.

If I had to pick one book to be stranded on a dessert island with (of course that island would need wireless internet and electricity) it would be this book. I can't think of a real world question this book couldn't answer. Many of the sections were in a "How do I " style like "Change password for User Account?" or "Share a USB Printer over an Ethernet Network." Being a real world Tiger user, I can't think of a single question this book doesn't answer. I also found it handy when there were things I heard about in Tiger, but couldn't remember where they were or how to use them. For example, I know there's a program that will take pictures of the screen, but can't remember where it is. I can't search help if I don't know what I'm looking for. A quick flip through the Applications and Utilities section in the book helped me find what I was looking for.

This is not a tutorial book. Toporek states the "how to" do something without actually walking you through it and doesn't explain why he's telling you to do something. I like to think of this as a recipe book for using Tiger. Follow the recipe exactly and you'll be fine, but don't expect to be told why you must preheat the oven or make sure to temper the eggs when making custard.

I highly recommend this book for a intermediate Mac user who would rather look something up in a book then search for the answers in Google or call their tech savvy friends. I went out and bought one personally for myself I liked it so much!

Pros: Efficient and straightforward guide on how to use Tiger efficiently and effectively.
Cons: Not for the intro user, if you are looking for a bunch of pretty pictures and hand-holding--go elsewhere.

Minimal Perl focuses on translating UNIX/Linux shell commands to Perl (awk, sed, grep, and the like). It doesn't go into whole programs as much as single-use lines, which is fine for simple tasks like checking log files or filtering text files. There are a few conventional programs thrown in the book but all of them are very short. In fact, the comments generally outweigh the code.
Don't take that as bad, though. Tim Maher introduces some great ideas that I haven't seen in the other Perl books I've read. It's a great reference to have on hand for simple tasks. Maher uses clear examples and clever text to get across some complex (and often difficult to read) Perl.
If your looking for traditional programming book, this probably isn't for you. Stick with O'Reilly for how to write complete programs. Minimal Perl is all about quick and disposable code that's more powerful then shell commands but not the overkill of a complete program.

This is an excellent Perl tutorial for those who are already familiar with UNIX/Linux shell scripting and other common utilities like find, sed, grep, and awk. Perl combines the strengths of each of these tools and surpasses them in one powerful and portable scripting language. This book is well worth the time and money spent with it for those in its target audience. This book is very well written. The examples are easy to follow and well thought out. The author clearly has a deep knowledge and long experience with the material presented. He takes a very common sense and practical approach to teaching the essentials of Perl scripting without getting the reader bogged down in all the details and capabilities of the language. He seems to have done an excellent job in selecting those parts of Perl that are of the most use for the greatest number of people who need to make use of it. I highly recommend this book.

If you are an experienced Sys Admin in the Unix world and need to know enough Perl for scripting, this book is good - but its not a beginners book- the author expects you be familiar with command line Unix and scripting.

The cw tells you to not to use perl when traditional commands will do, but this book tosses that aside. It thoroughly covers several use cases where perl really does a better job. In addition, by switching from sed, grep, awk, and so forth completely to perl, you don't have to think as much of syntax stuff each time you run a command. One of the first things that sold me was eliminating the common stack of greps, and replacing it with a single line of perl.

The book is also well written and enjoyable. You should have some basic abilities in perl or unix/linux, but it provides a lot of introductory material that is specific to this book's idiom of minimal perl. If you have questions about the book, the publisher provides a forum to ask the author.

If you believe in the unix way, but are sometimes frustrated by whichever unix you use, or especially if you switch between unices, this book offers a way to cure that frustration.

One thing I really loved about this book is that it is short and sweet, well written, clear. It covers extremely popular functionality (text search, text manipulation, column/field manipulation, file search) in Perl as it compares to the popular tools: grep, sed, awk, and find (including extended and GNU varieties). It documents how to do the equivalent in Perl, but also covers the advantages and disadvantages in doing these chores Perl. The coverage is really well written.

What really struck me personally, is that for a long time, I was baffled about why there was no simple way to extract columns or fields from fixed-width data. I used regular expression or split in Perl, which I thought was overkill. Unix has simple mechanisms using cut and awk for this, and after many hours scouring the net and published books, I couldn't find any coverage of a simple solution, until I came across this book.

If you do any automation on Unix (or even Windows) that requires extracting or manipulating text data, this book is an ultimate resource for your library. Anyone serious about Perl and/or system administration type of chores, should not pass this book up.

This books gets you going. It's all you need

This is a great book to get Linux up and running. Some areas are just a little too brief. For example, the description for setting up Samba (the component that lets a Window machine use its explorer to browse shared folders) leaves out a couple of check boxes which are actually required and shown selected in the figure. Overall a better start than most big bricks.

Though not a reference book, this is the best book I have seen for Red Hat Linux. If you're new to Linux, BUY THIS BOOK FIRST! If you know what you're doing in Linux, this book is still a great resource when refreshing your memory on less used parts of the system/software. As with most of the Visual QuickStart books (also by Peachpit), it stream lines the learning curve! I am a professional Web developer who has been programming since I was a small child.

As you all know, Linux is gradually making a big statement in this new year. This book will get you started for the future, because the future is Linux.

The CD-ROM that comes with this computer contains an old version of Red Hat Linux, version 6.0, as opposed to the latest version 6.2. It didn't have the drivers for my newer computer, so I purchased the 6.2 box, and this really is significantly better. Since the book just covers 6.0, I've found the Red Hat documentation to be more useful than it. Even if this book were up to date, it is still poorly organized and incomplete. I just purchased the book Special Edition Using Red Hat Linux, and while it is lengthy, it covers 6.2 (with CD-ROM) and seems quite straightforward.

When I first started writing shell scripts, I found myself referring to this book constantly - and I do mean CONSTANTLY. Simple straightforward explanations and lots of examples.

I had 2-3 other books that all wound up gathering dust while this one just kept getting thumbed through.

I wrote all kinds of software for over thirty years on everything from embedded microprocessors to giant number crunchers.

This was one of the most helpful books I ever used in any of those milieus.

This is Kernighan and Pike, "UNIX Programming
Environment" written for the c-shell. Best book
on the (t)c-shell.

I used this book to learn more than just the fundamentals of C shell programming. Some time it is more efficient to switch to or supplement with the C shell and save many borne shell steps to accomplish the same process. The C shell environment is robust. What the C shell is not is intuitive. Therefore, you need this book for any serious scripting. One example of the usefulness of the book is the use of the "here" document. Here documents can be found in other shells also but if you want to know how to use this function and take in literal information without substitution then you will need to read this book.

This is also the basis of tcsh

It's only good for beginner of c shell programmin

The C shell (csh) is a Unix shell developed by Bill Joy for the BSD Unix system. It was originally derived from the 6th Edition Unix /bin/sh, the predecessor of the Bourne shell. Its syntax is modeled after the C programming language. The C shell added many feature improvements over the Bourne shell, such as aliases and command history. Today, the C shell is not widely used because it has been superceded by other shells such as the Tenex C shell (tcsh), the Korn shell (ksh), and the GNU Bourne-Again shell (bash). The C shell's scripting capability came under criticism in the early-to-mid 1990s for its ambiguity, especially with respect to quoting and redirection.
An example of possibly unwelcome behavior of csh scripts is the following:
if ( ! -e foo ) echo bar > foo
It would appear to say "if file 'foo' does not exist, create it with contents 'bar'". But it will in fact create an empty file, as the line is parsed such that the output redirect is set up before the file existence is tested. However, if you are a big fan of the C Shell or legacy code has forced you to deal with it, this is the definitive guide to it, even if it is 20 years old. The book is organized as follows:
Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the shell. Chapter 1 discusses what it is, what it does, and how you use it. Chapter 2 gives a brief tour of the shell with a sample terminal session.
Chapters 3 through 6 present the C Shell as an interactive command language. Chapter 3 presents the C shell's basic command forms. Chapter 4 shows the C shell's power - its command shorthand. Chapter 5 shows how to juggle your commands using job control. Chapter 6 covers the history and alias mechanisms, which are the C shell's original claims to fame.
Chapters 7 and 8 present the shell as a programming language. Chapter 7 covers the basic language forms and Chapter 8 discusses more advanced techniques. Both chapters contain plenty of example scripts.
Chapter 9 shows how to customize the C shell to accommodate your terminal type, working habits, login/logout procedures, and custom commands.
Chapter 10 explains how the C shell works and how it interfaces to the UNIX system. Included are plenty of diagrams to illustrate just how the C shell executes commands.
Finally, chapter 11 is a collection of C shell scripts that illustrate a particular technique, perform an interesting task, or solve a problem. Most are actual scripts in use on production UNIX systems at the time this book was printed.
This book should be on the shelf of anyone who must work with the C shell on a regular basis.