Book details of 'Understanding Unix'

Title	Understanding Unix
Author(s)	Stan Kelly-Bootle
ISBN	0782114997
Language	English
Published	September 1994
Publisher	Sybex

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Understanding Unix':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
When this book was written, Linus Thorvalds was only just pulling together his merry band of open sorcerers, the World Wide Web, if you had heard about it at all, was probably accessed through something called Lynx, and if you had a really serious connection to the Internet you probably had an account on a UNIX box. Chapter one starts at the very beginning: logging in, and logging out. The instructions and explanations are very clear, making sure that the reader understands what is going on, and what could go wrong. Humour is used to reinforce the lessons, as one would expect from Mr Contradictionary (see reviews) himself. A few commands are described in chapter two, but the greater emphasis is placed on how commands function, and how the shell processes them. The UNIX filesystem directory and tree structure is presented in chapter three. Having enough information to start exploring the filesystem, users will probably start wanting to create files. Chapter four not only starts to list those commands, but also useful side issues like wildcards and the man command. Electronic mail is explained using the mail command in chapter five. Chapters six and seven deal with customization, first of shell and some interface functions, and then of permissions within the users scope. Chapter eight looks at the most basic UNIX editor, ed, also introducing regular expressions. Process manipulation is not all that complicated a topic as explained in chapter nine. Printing and printer management are described in chapter ten. The vi editor family is dealt with in chapter eleven and twelve, first simply and then in more advanced terms. Advanced shell operations and scripts are given in chapter thirteen. (An appendix at the end of the book lists differences between the shells.) Chapter fourteen starts looking into the UNIX toolbox with the sort, uniq, head, tail, split, cut, paste, find, tr, translate, and dd commands. Fifteen ups the ante with the highly useful but slightly more difficult to use grep family, sed, and awk. Further extensions of shell scripts are available with while, test, read, if and case in chapter sixteen. Networks, from uucp to the Internet, are quickly explained in chapter seventeen. System administration topics get once over lightly in chapter eighteen. Chapter nineteen discusses the X windowing system. A final postscript looks at the history and possible future of UNIX. Nowadays, of course, the world has changed radically. Linux is well established as not only a hobbyist system, but is making inroads for home use, and even business systems. If you want to run a Web server, Apache is one of the most functional around. And if you want to do anything on the net more serious than surfing and cookie-cutter home pages, you are likely to encounter a UNIX system. Hmmmm. Maybe there is still room for a book on learning UNIX after all. This text will certainly get you there. I am not sure that I could recommend it over books like McMullen's "Complete Idiot's Guide to UNIX" (see reviews) (distasteful as the title is) or Welsh and Kaufman's "Running Linux" (see reviews), although it certainly isn't much behind. In truth, the choice is probably going to lie in personal preference. Kelly-Bootle's style is certainly readable and understandable, but after the first few chapters he does rather lapse into a UNIX culture style of documentation. On the one hand, that may be a little difficult for those coming to UNIX for the first time to completely relate to. On the other, it does mean that, if you start from the beginning and work your way through, by the time you finish you will not only know a great deal about UNIX, but also UNIX culture. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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Book description:

A practical guide for UNIX users at all levels. Coverage includes installation, architecture and operating principles, essential commands and options, optimization, shell programming, system management, communications, graphical user interfaces, and more.