A Scientist's and Engineer's Guide to Workstations and Supercomputers: Coping with Unix, RISC, Vectors, and Programming

As another reviewer has mentioned, the book is very practical. It treats almost all the topics you will sometime encounter in your scientific/research career, if you work on Unix systems. I could have saved a lot of time looking for freeware had I first looked in this book. The book covers the use of gnuplot, the free plotting program, and also mentions many very useful utilities. Personally, I downloaded xmgrace, a superb graphing free software. Customizing xterm windows and the motif window manager are some of the other things I found interesting. Now, my workstation menu features everything I will use in the course of the day. (Much like windows 95, only more powerful). It took me two years to learn through trial what is here!

It's a wonderful book for both beginner and advanced users of UNIX system. Its comprehensive contents help me learn every aspects of UNIX needed in scientific field. I learned many new things by reading this book. I am very exciting.