This book is awesome!
I have been a Unix Systems Administrator for ten years but am weak in creating my own Unix shell scripts. I currently administer hundreds of enterprise class Unix servers with AIX, Solaris and RHEL for a major corporation. I bought this book to help me understand scripting more and to help me learn how to write my own scripts instead of copying other peoples scripts. After reading this book, I now can create my own scripts, from scratch and completely understand other peoples scripts. This book explains the syntax of every scripting technique, character...etc. The examples in this book are great and provide many real world techniques to help any System Administrator do their job more efficiently and ultimately faster. Thank You Mr. Randal Michael! I would highly recommend this book to the new Unix System Administrator all the way up to the seasoned expert!
wide span of topics for sysadmins and programmers
[A review of the 2ND EDITION, where the latter was published in June 2008.]
Perhaps you are a programmer or sysadmin of a heterogeneous network of unix and linux machines. Where the unixes hail from different vendors. Think Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and the Macintosh. (Yes, the Mac runs a descendent of Mach, which is a dialect of unix.) And maybe the linux boxes have different distros. This book spans the gamut of most unixes (I include linux in this). Helping you easily write shell scripts, without taking sides over which unix or linux version is better.
The second ecumenical aspect is that it also avoids favouring any of the 3 major unix shells - Borne, Korn and bash. In some newsgroups, there has been a tedious and interminable debate about the relative virtues of these shells. While one shell might indeed be better than others for a given task, in general they have equivalent functionality. The book's evenhanded approach is one worth emulating.
Thoughtfully, the book suggests topics that might be typically useful to sysadmins, and others more suited to programmers. It is not a strict divide. But for sysadmins, you can see discussions about how to monitor disk partitions, or system load and swap space usage. These are often issues germane to your duties.
The bulk of the book is more on programmer-related topics. Much. Note that the book is largely random access, unlike a science textbook for example, which is serial access from the front. In other words, with just a minimal acquaintance with basic scripting, you can dive straight into any chapter, without reading its predecessor.
Excellent reference book for shell scripting
This is an excellent book for unix shell scripting. Pretty much covers everything from A-Z.
Great Korn shell book for sysadmins
Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting is a good book on writing Korn shell scripts. If you need BASH or CSH or something else, get another book.
All of the examples in the book are directed towards Systems Administrators. That is not a bad thing. Too many books give you examples that have no use outside the one bit they are trying to teach you. Each example in this book has a real world function. The scripts cover Linux, HP-UX, Solaris and AIX. The examples are straight forward and have lots of useful comments and techniques.
My only complaint about the book is it lacks any real reference value. It would be nice to have a summary of language features. Even with that drawback I would recommend this book over the O'Reiely book.
WOW...You will love this book!
This book is great! I Recently landed a job as a Systems Administrator (Solaris), and I needed to know how to script. With little scripting experience (and me not wanting to loose the job of my dreams); I picked this book up. All I can say is WOW. What a GREAT book. It describes step by step what to do, how it's done and why it's done. Although it's exclusively KSH, it does have the same script written in different formats so that it works with Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and other Unicies.
This book assumes that you know SOME basic scripting skills. Beginners would have to learn some basic scripting and (more importantly) understand the concept besides the actual command(s). I recommend this book for, nonetheless, to everyone who wants/needs to script. Happy scripting!
(18 reviews)
