A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming (3rd Edition)
“First Sobell taught people how to use Linux . . . now he teaches you the power of Linux. A must-have book for anyone who wants to take Linux to the next level.” –Jon “maddog” Hall, Executive Director, Linux International New Chapters on Python and MySQL–Covers Perl, too! Learn from hundreds of realistic, high-quality examples, and become a true Linux command-line guru! NEW! Covers busybox, Midnight Commander, screen, and sshfs/curlftpf Covers the Mac OS X com
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A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming (3rd Edition),
Despite the fact that I am actually quoted in this book in the “Praise foe other books by Mark G. Sobell” section, it really is a good book! Scratch that, it is a book that I am going to make *sure* makes the rounds through my office.
Here’s the trick. There are a million books and websites and such that have some general instruction on generalized shell scripting or particular commands or even topical stuffs. By and large, they are incomplete and usually feature a bunch of theoretical examples like “suppose you want to draw a box with three nested boxes inside…” Those kinds of things really aren’t much help to the average guy and that is where this book differs.
This book is chocked full of great command explanations, practical topics and real life examples. Sobell has gone out of his way to present this information not only in an interesting fashion, but a usable one as well, not to mention being very Linux distribution agnostic in the process. For example, he covers both the apt-get and yum utilities. There are even some OS X notes as well.
This is a vast and enormous subject to cover and Sobell does his usual excellent job with it. He starts you out with a little background, moves you into using editors and commands and different shells and even into some interpreted languages, all while guiding you through enough pertinent information to not only perk you interest a little on the subject, but give you a functional, working understanding as well. Great job and this is certainly another book I will be holding on to – at least until the next edition comes out
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|Detailed and Complete, Ultimate Linux Guru Material,
With the 3rd edition of this book, “A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors and Shell Programming” only got better.
I say this with a reasonable bias and favoritism towards Linux, its command line interface which I consider some of the most versatile
and best engineering accomplishments and towards this book, which has been my favorite since the first edition.
The first edition of the book, was the manual, reference and tutorial all in one that I have been looking for a long time. I have been looking for a book that takes me into the command line world of Linux but in a methodical way describing all the little options, tips, tricks but also the principles that make Linux shell so powerful.
Book begins with a brief history of Linux and very informative, relevant overview of the system architecture.
It proceeds with the in depth, hands on walkthrogugh the environment, shells, and command line utilities.
There is a very useful and every-day practical exercise at the end of the each chapter.
Book continues with in depth chapters on Linux filesystem, the shell, editors (emacs and vi) and the programming environment including (g)awk and sed. This third version of the book now covers the OSX’s command line interface which is very nice.
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The best, and for me,the ultimate buy-in factor for the third edition, is the brand new chapter covering to reasonable depth Python.
There is also a full, new chapter on MySQL. (That Sobell added a chapter on Postgres, I would give him six stars
Book concludes with excellend command reference section (300 pages) and Appendix on regular expressions (superb),
getting help with Linux and keeping the system up to date (using rpm, yum apt-get and bit torrent).
This is one of those rare books that in one domain offers a complete package to those who want to became specialists ( Linux CLI, system administration).
Although Linux is popular, Linux CLI and system administration skills are still relatively rare (and well paid).
I recommend this books to all who want to get not better, but great at this aspect of Linux. If nothing else, it will boost your geek bragging rights.
Five stars!
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