Very well done introduction to shell programming

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.

Other Reviews

• good for recommendation to new programmers
• Extremely good Unix book
• Still the best
• Great unix book
• Very well done introduction to shell programming