Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours

This is probably one of the best books by Sams that I've read. If you want to start shell programming, you've picked up the perfect book, even if you're new to Unix. It starts off by first getting you familiar with the basic Unix commands: ls, pwd, cp, mv, cat, etc. and telling you the basics of Unix and Shells. Then it goes over file systems and modifying attributes. Later when you're comfortable, it holds your hand through the shell programming syntax, logic, substititution, regular expressions, and essential tools such as awk and sed. This book contains other gems and snippets that have helped me through many projects. Overall good buy.

I took a class in shell scripting and learned almost nothing...I tried a couple of other books and then was lucky enough to findthis one.Hey, it's short, it's clear and it has a few questions at the end of every chapter that let you test your knowledge. It's also organized so you can learn one thing at a time, which is different from others that throw lots of things at you, but don't explain them all till later.Anyway, forget the rest. Just get this little, inexpensive book. It will get you up to speed fast.

This book provides a very good foundation so that one may learn Unix shell scripting. It also allows one to understand the more advanced books, which is very important. I thought there were some sections of the book that were a bit sketchy in their explanation. For example, the no-op operator (:) was not explained to my liking (although a fairly good attempt was made). Overall, however, the beginner to Unix will learn much from this book.

Glad to see the other good reviews. I was impressed and wanted to see what others had to say.This is the way it should be done. Definitely appreciated the emphasis on the bash shell and the inclusion of other useful tools. Pleasantly surprised by the depth and quality of the examples...this is one of the best book in SAMS catalog. Author also had a chapter or two in Kao's Special Edition Using Unix, which was a solid book even though it is a major doorstop in size. Looking forward to more titles from Veeraraghavan.It looks like the quality of non-O'Reilly titles may be improving after all...

I've spent the last month learning the basic commands of Unix. Where the real challenge of System Administration comes in is writing scripts. Never has there been a book so useful! Better than O'Reilly shell books..