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Learning the bash Shell, Third Edition
reviewed by William Deegan, August 2006
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| If you're like my you own quite a few O'Reilly books, some of which you've read cover to cover and some of which you use just for reference. For me though I've owned the second edition of "Learning the bash Shell" for quite some time, only picking it up when you have to work on a bash shell script. When I saw the opportunity to pick up the latest edition of the Bash book for free (well, in turn for this review), I jumped on it. |
| A little background is called for, I started working on VMS, and eventually transitioned to unix. Switching from DCL to tcsh, which was the default shell our system administrator configured for all users. Since then, I'd only used bourne or bash when I had to maintain someone elses script, and would pull out my trusty O'Reilly book to figure out what the heck this yucky bash syntax was doing. |
| Fast forward, I recieve the book in the mail and then realize, oh wait, I should probably read this thing cover to cover before writing a review of it. For me it was a somewhat eye-opening read and perhaps I will email my old sysadmin and admonish him for sending me down the tcsh/csh path for so long. |
| Now onto the book, the good and the bad. As with almost all of the O'Reilly books I own, the book is written in an easy to read style, where a number of scripts/programs are progressively improved using the new features just discussed. The text is clear and well written, not overly verbose or terse. Compared to the second edition many sections of text are the same of similar. If you don't know bourne/bash shell this book will very effectively teach you to write scripts and use the shell interactively. Unfortunately, compared to the second edition of the book there are numerous, at least 10 or 20, formatting errors probably introduced in the typesetting process. A large number of them are example text where the output of a command or some section of script which spans several lines and/or intentionally has some white space, is compressed to remove some of the white space and in many cases several lines are compressed to be a single line. These formatting errors do make it difficult to understand some examples, until you realize that the output/example is misformatted, then it becomes clear. This required rereading a number of examples, and did make the misformatted passages frustrating to read. |
| You can see the "confirmed errata" for the book at : http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bash3/errata/bash3.confirmed ] The third edition of "Learning the bash Shell" introduces new features in bash 3.0 (the second edition covered bash 2.0), in the process adding 16 pages, and a chapter on shell scripting. |
| So the big question, would I recommend purchasing the book? Well that depends on your reason for purchasing the book. If you don't own a book on bash/bourne shell, and need one as a reference/to learn bash, then this is a reasonable book to purchase, though I hope they have a second printing and fix the numerous formatting issues. If you own the second edition, then it may not be worthwhile to purchase this book, unless you need to learn/use features introduced in version 3.0. |