Download A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming (2nd Edition) ePub

I found this book to be just ok - it covers the basics of Linux and many important/frequently used commands but I am remotely satisfied with this book because the author focuses on stuff that many users probably will find less useful.

The learning curve is quite steep if you're relatively new to Linux - the author is describing very basic stuff like GNU, Linux file systems, simple shell commands and such, and then suddenly rushes into complicated shell programming and scripts.

Few examples from this book that I know I will never use but who knows, other users may find that:

-This book is great if you're into emacs and vi(m) since it dedicates over 100 pages on these two text editors but I prefer using nano so for me these chapters were more or less wasted.
-This book is great if you're into shell programming.

Why spend 100+ pages on vim and emacs when at least some pages could've been dedicated to a Security Section that this book doesn't have?
Perhaps emacs and vim are important because programming requires a good set of text editors..?

The Appendix is great though - there's an extensive collection of commands that can be useful for all newbies and intermediate users.

Someone will probably flame me for this review, saying I should've read the book's title before purchasing it. Yes, you are right - I should've.
But then again, if this book clearly was written for intermediate users, why mention GNU, basics of Linux and its file systems and so forth to begin with?

I recently was fortunate enough to receive a review copy of this book from Prentice Hall publishers, and am happy to submit this review. I found this very large volume (1008 pages!) to be quite interesting and a valuable source of information for both Linux beginners and veterans alike. As the title may suggest, it covers some of the most commonly used Linux commands, the two main editors (Vim and Emacs), and some shell programming techniques with the Bash and tcsh shells. I found it to be quite "distro-neutral", as the material presented should be available on virtually any Linux system, and does not reference distro-specific tools. The book seems very well organized into Parts and Chapters, and there are also some excellent appendices and additional matter at the end of the book, which I'll discuss later in this review.

Part I is entitled "The Linux Operating System", and starts out with some introductory "welcome" and "getting started" material which is good reading for newbies but can easily be skipped by others. The next chapter in this part covers how to use the more commonly used commands such as ls, cp, rm, and tar. This is followed up by a chapter on the Linux filesystem, including the hierarchical layout, directories, pathnames, permissions, and file links. There is a nice section in this chapter which describes what is found in nearly all of the standard directories such as /boot, /etc, /home, /usr, and so on. Also notable here was an excellent description of how to set (and understand!) file and directory permissions. The final chapter in this part provides an introduction to the shell and command line. It covers standard input/output, redirection, pipes, and backgrounding of commands. Most of the information in these first 5 chapters will probably be a review for more experienced Linux users, but they are outstanding reading for newcomers. One thing I did notice as a great feature of the book is that there is a "Chapter Summary" at the end of each chapter which is really excellent, and a list of "Exercises" to help you see and use the information in a more hands-on way.

Part II is called simply "The Editors", and devotes about 60 pages each to Vim and Emacs. A brief history of each is provided, and a pretty good tutorial of basic usage is walked through. Both chapters include a command referance/summary, and some customization tips. Even the well known "debate" about which editor to use is mentioned, although no preference is indicated. For the record, this writer prefers Vim... J There are more in-depth books available to explain each editor in greater detail, but these chapters provide a good introductory lesson.

Part III contains two chapters, one each on the "bash" shell and the "tcsh" shell. Some of the procedures and concepts in this part may well be more information than is desired by many Linux users, but command-line types will want to read all of this material. The differences between these two shells are discussed, and the fact that most users will only need to learn about "bash", as it is normally the default shell on most modern Linux distributions. I found some good information on customizing your shell, and using the "dot files" such as .bash_profile and .bashrc to control things like aliases and your environment variables.

Part IV covers "Programming Tools". The first chapter here discusses programming in C, including the basics of the gcc compiler, using shared libraries, debugging procedures, system calls, and source code management (CVS). It should be noted that this chapter describes the process of writing and compiling programs with C, but is not intended to teach C programming if you don't already understand most of it. The next chapter (11) is a quite extensive (about 100 pages) discussion of programming with the Bash shell. It covers control structures, parameters, variables, loops, arrays, expressions, functions, and builtin commands. Numerous examples are shown to help with understanding the concepts. I would recommend this particular chapter for those wishing to increase their ability to write effective shell scripts for system administration. The final two chapters in Part IV cover the "gawk" and "sed" utilities, which are essential for more advanced text processing and shell scripting. Again, there are numerous excellent examples given which really aid in understanding the material, followed by some suggested excercises for putting your new knowledge to work. This part should be required reading for any system administrator.

Part V is the "Command Reference" section. This is a very complete reference (240 pages) on how to use virtually all Linux utilities and shell builtins, from "at" to "xargs". The layout for each command is presented in the manner of a man page, only much more readable and including excellent notes and examples which are not found in a man page. All options are well explained, and there is extensive use of tables and summaries. This may be the most useful portion of the entire book, and serves both as a great refresher for veterans, and a nice learning process for beginners. The material here is presented in "plain English", which helps a lot.

The remainder of the book is made up of three appendixes, a glossary, and an index. Appendix A is an excellent presentation of "regular expressions", an often little-understood but important skill for system administrators to have. Spend some time reading this one. Appendix B is simply called "Help", and tells you about the wide array of help resources available to a Linux user. Helpful websites are listed, and mailing lists and newsgroups are described. The final Appendix C touches on keeping your system updated, although it is quite limited by only discussing the "yum" and "apt" utilities. This could have been done a little better by including some additional distro tools, and/or more generic ideas for updating. The final two sections of the book are a 50 page Glossary and a 50 page Index, both of which seem quite complete.

Overall I found this book to be quite excellent, and it has earned a spot on the very front of my bookshelf. It covers the real "guts" of Linux - the command line and it's utilities, and does so very well. It's strongest points are the outstanding use of examples, and the Command Reference section. Highly recommended for Linux users of all skill levels. Well done to Mark Sobell and Prentice Hall for this outstanding book!

I'll keep it short. A full review would take too much time and space.

The good:
This is a very large reference manual, with lots of information in it on a wide variety of subjects. The fact that there is an entire chapter on MySQL is a big plus, as anyone who deals with software professionally NEEDS to know about databases. The more, the better. The indices in the book are some of the best I've seen. Redundancies are not always a bad thing!

The bad:
Probably just a personal gripe, but the author doesn't use strict/warnings in his Perl code. It doesn't seem to be a "Perl for people who already know Perl" chapter. Any intro to Perl should use strict/warnings. Perl lets you do all kinds of crazy things, which is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Using strict/warnings in ALL of your Perl helps you learn to write better code. When you KNOW how to write code and know when to add "no strict" to a subroutine (or just leave it out entirely) to work some Perl magic, then you can take advantage of the added freedoms. Nearly all of the scripts in this chapter need to be partially or completely rewritten if you use strict, but I suppose that's just another way of learning Perl.

The slightly ugly:
Keep in mind that this is a reference book, not Lord of the freakin Rings (unless you spend way too much time with computers, I suppose). There are multiple instances on just about every page of "refer to xyz on page 1###" when you're only on page 3##. There's a lot of flipping around to various sections of the book, like one of those old "Choose your own story" books. Granted, it's tough to pull off a book this thick and dense without doing that, but there was just a LOT of it, and it gets a bit old after a while.

The short version:
It's a very dense reference manual that needs the company of a few "lighter" books to fill in some gaps and provide some more in-depth info on the more interesting (for you) sections.