The only game in town, but...

I've got two versions of this book: the blue cover version and the one that came in my CD bookshelf. I'm usually quite positive about nutshell books. Usually.

While this is pretty much the only one-stop Unix reference in town when you don't have the man pages to hand, there are some perplexing omissions from the "unix command" section. Nothing to do with networking, for example. No netstat, ifconfig, nslookup. Odd, in a world when a non-networked computer is surely a rarity. Yes, the stuff is probably in the networking O'Reilly books (mine are on order as I type) but you'd think in this day and age...

Yesterday I was flipping through and noticed there was no entry for "mount" or "umount" either.

You should probably own one of these if you have a job in the Unix computing biz, but before long you might find yourself asking "what will I need today that won't be in a nutshell?"

Seriously, O'Reilly should be looking into rewriting this little gem to make it properly comprehensive again.

Other Reviews

• It's a wast of money. Use the internet if you want a reference.
• A Desktop Constant
• A wonderful reference book about Unix OS
• The perfect reference
• The only game in town, but...