Average Customer Review: 
| A great book of script examples. | |
A great book for learning shell scripting. It starts out with general syntax but then the rest of the book in filled with micro examples of things you need to write scripts, like input, output, prompting, changing case, manipulating strings, parsing and extracting data, finding file sizes, checking free space, setting screen echo on/off, read with a timeout, text substitution, doing math, here files, etc. There are also sections on portability, debugging, and common problems. I am very happy with this book and use it often when I am scripting.
| One of the best shell programming books I've read! | |
Although I've been shell programming for years, I still learned a lot of new material from this book. Unlike Bill Rosenblatt's book, "Learning the Korn Shell", this book is extremely well thought out and presents subjects in a logical order. I would even recommend this book to people new to shell programming. In addition, unlike most of the other books I've read, ALL of the examples actually work! Mr. Blinn has even taken the time to make sure the examples will work on most every platform (Solaris, HP-UX, ULTRIX, ...).As the book states, we learn shell programming best by looking at examples of shell scripts. This book is a gold mine of examples which are practical and applicable to a System Administrator's every day job. They really help to reinforce some of the more advanced and/or cryptic shell programming features. Mr. Blinn also does an outstanding job of explaining each shell script in detail. He does not leave the reader guessing or confused. To be fair, I have to include the fact that the diskette which came with my book was blank. However, by following the instructions in the book I was able to download them from Prentice Hall's FTP site in less than 5 minutes.
This has proven to be an excellent reference. It provides lots of examples of common shell constructs and presents them in a format which should run well on bourne, korn, POSIX, and compatible interpreters.For example, I was unclear on the proper syntax for a simple "if" statement with a string comparison until I read this book. Syntax is presented up-front in the first chapter so there are no lingering doubts later on. It answered a lot of questions I still had after I finished "Learning the Korn Shell" from O'Reilley.
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