Cheap UNIX Shells by Example (3rd Edition) (Book) (Ellie Quigley) Price

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Customer Reviews of UNIX Shells by Example (3rd Edition)

Great reference, but with some errors
This book is awesome. I am a command-line Unix geek by trade, but hadn't written a line of programming of any kind since BASIC in high school. I sat down with this book and, with the help of a few Google searches, was writing solid Korn Shell scripts in a week. With this book I was able to write an awk routine (my first one ever) that cut a job one of my co-workers was doing from 3 hours down to five minutes.

I would recommend this as a must-have if you learn to do stuff by example. If you are looking for an O'Reilly-type desk reference, this is not your book.

I have one MAJOR gripe about this book, the index is very sloppy for information contained in the last 1/4 of the book, it looks like the index didn't get updated right after and edit....

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Best syntax reference for shells
I'm a unix system admin, and I use this book on a regular basis. It solves the problem of remembering the syntax from one shell to another. The text uses examples to teach you how to do command line and scripting in bourne, korn and c shells. I found it to be very straight forward, and I can flip to the section I need and have the example right there to put into my script.

I have little yellow sticky notes all through this book on the references I use the most. I recommend it to all my system administrator colleagues, and it's a must for newbies to understand what's going on with their shells.

She also has a Perl by Example book that works the same way.

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Best Unix Shell for everyone - Beginners and Advanced users
Unix Shells by Example is my sixth UNIX-based programming book. And certainly the BEST of all. DOS-like Command-line oriented interface has been my favorite over windows for obvious reasons... I have been working with them since the days of Wordperfect5 (wp5) for DOS; ... way before the introduction of Windows 3.1. Since then, I have gone through several batch scripting/programming books. Now transitioning to the world of Linux/Unix, I was disappointed by all the shell programming books that I have used so far before coming across Ellie Quigley's book. It was so good that 3 of my colleagues ordered a copy each (a new 3rd edition).

Pros: Provides a step-by-step on how-to accomplish a real-world task with a sample code. Plus a concise & straight forward narrative/explanation of every line or special character used in the examples. Before reading this book, I have used many Unix symbols without knowing the reasons behind their use or alternate options. Other books have always provided a generalized answer of "it is the standard procedure". Such as "#!/bin/ksh"
Also, it provides comparison between various flavors/versions of unix shells. So where ever you find your self in, whether you inherited a system with scripts written in Csh, Sh, bash, or my favorite 'ksh'; there is an answer for it in the book.

Cons: the author could have provide more than one scenario for each of the examples.