UNIX Made Easy: The Basics and Beyond

I have been teaching with this book for many years, over 700 students. Class evaluations always rate the book very highly with comments about how clear explanations are. Students learn so much doing the exercises that class discussions are at a much higher level. We use this text in classroom and internet distance learning with great success. The few students over the years who had trouble in the class were trying to avoid doing the work by just looking up answers. That approach isnot effective because the book is built skill upon skill. Students must start at the beginning and actually do the work at the terminal. At first a few students tried to just read it. That approach did not work either. Now I make it very clear that the book is a detailed, hands-on, guide coupled with exact explanations. It must be worked through carefully, at the terminal. When students are willing to put in the effort and do that, they are well rewarded with knowledge and the ability to really do UNIX. I suspect the two reviewers who found the book difficult were not using it properly. My students love it.

This book is seen as the essential learning tool around here. It guides us along without pain to the place where we are really quite confident and quite skilled. Clearly it must be used hands on -- at the terminal -- it gives instructions, then explanations in a way that knowledge and skills grow quickly. It is obvious that the authors know a lot about how people learn and how to support that learning.Although not a reference book, command summaries are located at the ends of all chapters and the index is extensive allowing us to go back to look at a topic easily.Can't understand why it isn't 5 stars from everyone. Lots of good concise reference books out there -- this one does not attempt to be that. This book is like a tutor, but costs a lot less.

This is an excellent tutorial for the absolute beginner. It assumes that you know nothing about UNIX, but that you do have access to a UNIX box and that you will be able to spend some time in front of it each day practicing the exercises given in the book. Most of the book is concerned with the command line, but you will be given a few exercises to do in regards to the X Windows system. The basic UNIX utilities are covered simply and adequately, the file system is covered in detail, as is text editing with vi. Near the end of the book, you are given some Bourne shell scripting exercises which are helpful in system configuration. this book does not cover installation and configuration and is definitely not intended for anyone with even a small measure of real-world experience with UNIX. Is basically a tutorial and nothing more, but will get you up to speed if you are 100% new to this OS.

This is a marvelous book for beginners. You get step-by-step instructions for the usual stuff, and easily readable and very informative chapters on some things not usually covered in beginner books, like network considerations and using awk. I would have gone insane were it not for this book.

I have come back to this book more times then I can count. Its a great book for building basic Unix skills, and a nice introduction to shell programming. John is also an excellent teacher, and for anyone who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, look for Johns "Unix Made Easy" class at the UC Berekely Extension. Two thumbs up!Now if we can just get John to write a book on system administration...