Customer Reviews
Ignore the Bad Reviews - By: DBA-Developer, 10 Nov 2008 
This book not only covers the fundamentals of shell programming, it's a master work on the basics of prototyping & code reuse. I started work as a programmerin the bad ol' 3 GL days & eventually ended up workingin a .NET C# environment. Looking back on this uni text book, I'm still amazed at just how relevant its content still is to the OO world. Not to mention that as a Windoze dweller I'm still able to keep my hand sharpin the UNIX/LINUX mode simply by referring back to it. My staff all think I'm a wizard. This book & Howe's Data Analysis for Database Design have kept me employed for 18 years.
Where's the shell? - By: B. Chandler, 30 Sep 2003 
I don't like reading negative reviews. However this one is necessary as a warning. I was not being facetious, when I asked where is the shell? Anybody that would give this more than one star has only read the cover. And does not know that csh & c are two different things. For that matter the author does not know the CSH & c are two different things. Lowell Jay Arthur & Ted Barnes probably could not afford a computer between the two of them. There are absolutely no examples of this csh, or the tcsh shell, or the posix shell, or any industry used shells.
In deviating from shells, they talk about CGI as if it was a language instead of a protocol. They have examples of Netscape the way it looked when there was Windows 3.1. I stand corrected; they are gracious to say that the "C-Shell "provides an excellent pseudo code for C thein Chapter 13. Perhaps they must have read that somewhere.
I am sending this book back.
If you really intend on C programming:
UNIX Shell Programming (Hayden Books UNIX System Library) by Stephen G. Kochan, Patrick H. Wood (Contributor) ISBN: 067248448X
No, it's not perfect, but... - By: Big Gray Man, 06 Mar 2003 
I am an IT contractor with 14 years of experience. A few years ago I had an interview for a contract on the strength of the small exposure I had to UNIX Shell. I knew that to carry on paying the mortgage I was going to have to be pretty impressivein this area.
I already had the "Unixin a Nutshell" which is excellent, especially for understanding shells written by other people. However, I knew that I was going to need a framework of understanding if I was going to be able to knock a script together from scratch. I was also going to have to be able to read something that was presentedin a very readable "start to finish" manner.
This book provided me with this basic understanding. Taking me from the description of the various flavours of Unix shell, through to the login process, regular expressions, pipes, redirection & then on to how the commands "work".
I will concede that there are some typos, & various features described that I have never foundin any of the sites at which I've worked. But after a weekend of unremitting reading & taking notes, & rereading, this book got me a job & earned me money. That's the bottom line.
It is for experienced & capable IT professionals who have no broad understanding of the UNIX world. It will take you from a person with no UNIX credibility to someone who sounds like they've been doing it for a year or so. The commands & their options should be tackled with "UNIXin a Nutshell". With a book you can quickly flick from one page to another, cross referencing & sticking postits around the place - you can't do that with the man command.
Invaluable for System and Database Administrators - By: , 31 May 2002 As well as covering the basics of UNIX shell scripting, the book also provides a lot of good tips on using scripts for RAD development. The clowns who gave this book bad reviews have some personal axe to grind because I've found it invaluablein my day-2-day work as a UNIX based RDBMS DBA. It offers a really good exposition on regular expressions, far more lucid thanin the (otherwise excellent) Nutshell books on Sed, AWK & Perl. In short, if you're new to UNIX shell scripting or if you've learnt a bit by reading other peoples scripts, this book will give you a really powerful weaponin you admin arsenal.
Excellent - By: , 15 Feb 2000 I'm with Warren Young (see other reviews for this book). As someone who is not a programmer but is familiar with some computing concepts, I found this to be the only Unix reference book I have ever read which actually talks to mein English & genuinely helps me to step through concepts. I have borrowed the book from a friend & am just about to buy it for myself.
I'm not quite sure what its target audience is but thank God the authors are not trying to submerge mein technical babble from the start. It is a good book to read, to understand & to allow concepts to soakin with relatively little pain. Unlike the Unix man pages, which I often find quite unreadable, this book explains things at a level I can follow & builds up to more complex ideas at a comfortable pace.
I suspect it will not meet the needs of those who already have extensive Unix knowledge but for those of us who occupy that strange twilight world where we are not absolute beginners but are not knowledgable gurus either, I would recommend the book as extremely useful.
