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Beginning Shell Scripting (Programmer to Programmer) Review by Joaquin Menchaca
Seems More of Disorganized Showing Off
This book seems to want to introduce all and everything under the sun, as as such, the book looses focus quite a bit. For example, the in the beginning the author introduces samples of python, perl, and tcl, talks about batch, and then introduces a variety of text editors for all platforms. Later in the next chapter, we learn how to launch a music player and then echo out text, and then how to setup variable in bourne shell, and the c shell. I am grateful for his enthusiasm on the topic, but feels like I'm on a roller coaster ride of scrambled ideas related to shell scripting.
In looking forward to the chapter "Scripting with Files", I see some minor notes on chmod and file test conditionals for files. I don't see more advance topics like using find or stat or related topics, and instead we are presented with a conversation on Next file systems, Mac OS X file systems (UFS and HFS+). And on those topics, we get "gee that's neat to know" trivia, but it's totally useless, as there nothing on Mac specific commands like ditto or setfile to handle the Mac flavor of Unix.
On one topic on "Controlling Processes", the author explains the concept of processes and shows a screen shot of a Windows Task Manager. I was thinking, that well, maybe this book offers something different by showing how to script with Windows specific commands, like tasklist, but nope, we only get the screen shot, and following discussion on ps command and the /proc directory on Linux.
Overall, the book offers a lot of trivia on a variety of topics, and in some places there may be some scripts -- if you are lucky -- relating to the topic, and interspersed chaotically is some introduction material on shell scripting, sometimes bourne, sometimes c shell, sometimes something different. If this type of style works for you, then this might be the book, but I think for most of us, we'll want to follow more focused organized books relating to shell scripting (and of a particular scripting language, e.g. POSIX shell or other shell language).