sed & awk (2nd Edition)

Learning the vi Editor (6th Edition)

Classic Shell Scripting

Learning the Korn Shell (2nd Edition)

Shell

Using CSH & Tcsh (Nutshell Handbooks)

Format: Paperback
Author: Paul DuBois
ReleaseDate: 01 July, 1995
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

Massive omissions

I later realized that I could have found this from the other
reviews, but I fundamentally DON'T understand the purpose of a
book that leaves MOST of the details about csh/tcsh OUT of the
book. What the heck ? This book omits MOST of the commands of csh/tcsh. What is this, csh/tcsh for ignorant people who wish to
remain so ? Grrrr !.

One of the best book on LEARNING to USE the shell
This book fills the gap (hence the name "Using. I've seen many books on unix shells, however almost all the other books focus on shell programming instead of actually using shell to work more effectively and efficiently.. . ". I personally recommend Zsh if you are looking for the most comprehensive shell. However zsh is too comprehensive and there is no book on it. Tcsh shell is an EXCELLENT shell to do your work (type in commands, listing files, and etc). It has all the essential goodies: command line completion, command-line editor, history, and etc. It found it more friendly than ksh and less complex than bash and/or zsh. This book teaches you step by step how to use the shell to do your every day work effectively. The author explains everything clearly which is more than what I can say about many books that just touches a little bit of using the shell as a command interpreter aspect of the shell as if everyone spend more time writing the shell scripts than using the command line. These aspect of the csh/tcsh are the basis for similar utilities in the other shells: ksh, bash, and zsh. I find that even if you use bash or zsh, you'll appreciate the information in the book. The other reason the author didn't write much on programming is because c-shell is less frequently used in shell programming because of the now famous posting of "C shell programming considered harmful", which is also on the book's homepage. If you have the patience to read through the book, you will find it an excellent investment of time. (The only other book I would say this for sure is the "Learning the vi Editor. ".

I can explain the wide disparity in reviews of this book!


Here's the dope: a Unix shell is both an interactive command interpreter, and an environment for writing scripts, which are basically programs using the interactive commands and some logical control structures to automate tasks that don't really need to be run interactively. The five reviews of this book that have come in ahead of mine range from 1 star to 5! The reason is simple, but the people panning the book didn't explain (or understand?) the problem very well.

The author of this book, Paul Dubois, is of the opinion that neither csh nor tcsh are appropriate environments for shell scripting. I happen to disagree with him, at least insofar as I teach a little shell scripting in tcsh in my sophomore level software course. However, his opinion is worthy. . . making the argument that csh and tcsh shouldn't be used for shell scripting. Dubois recommends sh and perl for scripting.

So it boils down to this: this is an excellent book for learning how to make the most of the interactive environment of csh and tcsh. It's loaded with neat tricks and good insights. And it's a particularly good reference for tcsh, which usually gets little mention in other books.

If, on the other hand, you want a book about shell scripting, save your money: THIS IS NOT THE BOOK FOR YOU. It has no material on shell scripting.