Classic Shell Scripting 
Arnold Robbins & Nelson H.F. Beebe
ISBN 0-596-00595-4
(C)2005 O'REILLY Media Inc.
MSRP: $34.95
Overall Rating: 4/5 Penguins
Classic Shell Scripting, in its own words, bridges the gap
between
Learning Unix (see: UNIX 101) and
Unix in a
Nutshell (throw a manual page at the reader; he'll be fine). It's
aim is to provide a guide to writing scripts for the POSIX shell,
which can be approached by novice and expert alike. Every tool that is
introduced is accompanied by what looks like a condensed manual page,
going over the major options and any peculiarities that the reader
should know about. The book also has a chapter completely committed to
awk, an underappreciated text processing language.
But what good is any of this without examples? Every chapter is
bursting at the seams with them. Chapter 8 is comprised of nothing except for 2
examples summarizing everything learned so far, as is Chapter
11.
Classic Shell Scripting has 15 Chapters and 3 Appendices,
one of them devoted to the art of writing a manual page in
roff
markup. As has been my complaint with other O'REILLY books, there are
a few typos, but only one or two were really detrimental to the text.
Since this was a book on shell-scripting, I was surprised to find an
entire chapter devoted to
awk. This special attention to awk
was a bit of a double-edged sword. The chapter on awk was quite long,
so the coverage was rather complete, however I thought that the space
wasn't used efficiently. The examples on awk weren't thoroughly
described, and some of the techniques used weren't completely
explained elsewhere in the text. However, I feel that the coverage of
awk was due, as it is used extensively in later examples in the book.
Another nice thing about the book were its three Appendices,
Bibliography and Glossary, which accounted for about 20% of the book's
content. This extra material supplemented the text very nicely,
filling in some gaps that didn't really fit anywhere else. The
bibliography was very complete, giving reference to some very
informative sources beyond the scope of
Classic Shell
Scripting. The three appendices covered Manual Page writing, UNIX
files, and a cheatsheet of common commands, respectively. I think that
Appendix C ( the cheatsheet ) will prove an invaluable resource to
those readers who are new to shell scripting ( or even UNIX in
general). The history lesson on UNIX files was rather enlightening, as
was the Manual Page guide.
In all, I thought that
Classic Shell Scripting was a wonderful
primer on the world of shell scripting. It should prove to be an
invaluable tool for both shell newbies and UNIX veterans alike, if
only for its abundance of real-world examples. And like all O'REILLY
books, the sample code is made public for general consumption, so the
useful additions to the UNIX toolbox can be easily integrated into any
system. If they had just used their shell script from Chapter 12 on
the book itself ( Chapter 12 covers spellchecking! ), this book would
have scored a perfect five. But as it stands, I award
Classic Shell
Scripting 4 out of 5 penguins.
Linear Mode
