Special Edition Using Unix [With Includes Useful Administrative Tools & Scripts...]

I work with a couple of flavours of unix and find that some basic things slip through the cracks sometimes. I found that this book is great to refresh my mind on some of the differances between them and also simple things like the names of various utilities. Overall a good book if you want dabble in a Unix that you are not familiar with.

I use various flavours of UNIX (including Linux) and have found this book useful and well organised. It took me a while to find a concise reference which manages to direct one in the right direction, even if the exact solution isn't available. Ideal for people tampering with various UNIX systems simultaneously.

I haven't had a chance to go through the entire book yet, but from what I've seen, most of it is reasonably concise and thorough. However, they seem to like certain pieces of software more than others and thus leave holes in their text: 3 good examples are their discussion of Vi being more or less the editor of choice on UNIX systems--and then give just a glancing explanation of Emacs, not even mentioning its LISP capabilities (among others--we all know Emacs is less of an editor now and more of an environment!); their discussion of windowing systems didn't concentrate on X, but CDE, which runs under X; only 3 other managers got cursory mention, and FVWM wasn't even among them. But worst of all was that there isn't even a single mention of Perl in this book--NOT ONE MENTION!! Perl is more and more becoming indispensable now, not to mention the language of choice for CGI scripts. Nevertheless, this seems to be a pretty decent book overall, so I give it 4 stars, though part of me only wants to give 3.