Unix Power Tools

This is one of the greatest computer books I've ever owned.If you are a beginner, you can open this book, and find all kinds of great tools and techniques you never knew about before. Everything is described briefly, in just a page or two, so you can immediately get something out of it. If you are more advanced, you will find yourself flipping through pages, saying, "Yes, I knew that. Yes, I knew that. Oh, I didn't know that!"This book is jam packed with tips, techniques and tutorials. If you're a serious UNIX user or shell programmer, this is an extremely handy book to have around. It's only negative might be that there is just so much in here, it is sometimes overwhelming. On the up side, there is an excellent index at the back.

This is one of the best technical book that I bought in the last 10 years, at least from the organizational and layout point of the view. It contains hundreds of short articles, page or two in length organized in a remarkable way of cross-referenced, alamanc-like book.Articles are logically organized in chapters so you can read the book from cover to cover if you wish. However more likely you'll end up reading the book more randomly, following the cross-references. (I have some bad experience with the books organized in this way but this one is a clear exception.) The book is written for beginners and experts alike, since I'm a Unix newbie I can only confirm that; I hate to say but the life of Unix SA would be much easier if the man pages would be organized in a similar way -- including examples that're almost never there.I'm waiting for O'Reilly to update their "Unix CD Bookshelf" with third edition of this book because it's a little too heavy for carrying it with me.

I do not know about you, but for me, a book has to be pretty darn exceptional to persuade me to buy a second edition of a book which I already own the first. Unix Power Tools is one such book. It is simply packed with tons of useful tips which the authors have accumulated over decades of using Unix, and is a sort of `crème de la crème' of O'Reilly reference books.Praise aside, the book is not for everyone. It is an intermediate level reference, not an introductory tutorial. If your problems are like "How do I delete a file?", you should read something else first, get acquainted with Unix, and then return to it. If, however, the questions you face are more like "How do I delete a file with a null name?", then this is exactly the book for you. Unless there is a real Unix wizard around you, this book is likely to earn you this title in your environment.The second edition focuses on POSIX systems rather than on SysV/BSD, uses Bash and Tcsh instead of Sh, Ksh and Csh, and has moved from Awk to Perl. The two-colour printing is gone, though. Fortunately, the superb index - one of the best I have seen - is still here, and so are the cross-references in the text. Accompanying CD-ROM might be essential if you are living in the mountains of Tajikistan, but anybody connected to the Internet will probably prefer to download newer versions of software on-line.

This book is the best investment I have made and it applies to a lot of things you'd want to do, but never have thought about. 'Hyperlinked' contents point to other parts of the book if you need to know more is really a cool concept. It my Linux companion. I also used it to help those HP admins on some issues.

For the last several months I have been dealing with a Unix/Linux environmnet. I had no prior experience with Linux or Unix. However, I have to document and explain scripts, modules, and such every day as part of my work. This is the first book that has given me bite-sized, useful information in an explanatory format that doesn't waste my time. Whereas O'Reilly's Running Linux helped me very little after a nearly-full read-through, Unix Power Tools has taught me something every time I pick it up. What's more, the chapters are small (and intriguing) enough that a flip-through during a bathroom break can send me back to the keyboard to try something new. It's like an encyclopedia and your friend the SA in one. Get this and Essential System Administration and you cover the practical needs and the complex activities (respectively) of working in Unix-like-environments in two volumes.