Unix Power Tools, Third Edition
May.15, 2011 in
Shell Scripting
Unix Power Tools, Third Edition
Very occasionally a book is written about or for Unix System Administration, or Unix in general. If the author or publishers get the mix right it receives acclaim. Very, very occasionally one of those books achieves legendary status, by finding its way onto 98% of all Unix Sysadmins book shelves. This book is one of those legendary tomes. Just about every Unix Sysadmin I know has a copy of this sitting alongside books like Evi Nemeth’s “Unix Sys Admin Handbook”. OK so it has a lot of informatio
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May 15th, 2011 at 4:48 am
A Good Big Book – but worth the hype?,
A Good Big Book – but worth the hype?
The Unix Power Tools has already established a reputation of being a classic. The behemoth has no less that 1073 pages and goes accompanied by a CD with a lot of small shellscripts that are described in the book. The authors show a thorough understanding of the subject and are able to explain the ways of Unix in a casual talkative way. Much work is devoted to the layout and the text edition. For example, the crossreferences are well done, greyed out in readable italics. The publisher seems to understand the importance of easy readable text. Many of us know how a good book can be spoiled by hasty and bad editing, and it’s a relief to see that O’Reilly takes this issue seriously. The text is divided into paragraphs of about 1/4 to 1 page in size. These paragraphs deal with the Unix commands, the shells, the history of unix or the included nifty shellscripts. One might think that the authors view Unix as a collection of structured trivia – a view I personally like. You won’t read this book `cover to cover’ (to use that awful cliche), but you’ll start joyreading for that bit of advice or for that handy tool they’ve written. (For example: the thing that got me up the wall was that filenames can have empty spaces at the end, so it seems you cannot delete them. I should have known that one way earlier :^( ) Sometimes the authors write down some very casual paragraphs: a flame from usenet (Why NOT to use the C-shell for programming), the history of a command ( grep is: g from global, RE is regular expression, and the P stands for print, hence g/RE/P) or other fun to read items. It will not be the book you’ll grab for serious studying or when the system goes down unexpectedly. The problems with big books are usually twofold and this one suffers rather badly from it. First of all it is written for the novice and expert alike – a concept that comes from a marketing and not from educational point of view. The authors repeat the man pages – did you know you can find files by name with the `find’ command? And they go on for every Find option. The novice who didn’t know about the find command will not try anything as fancy like to build a database with the filestructure in it in order to speed up his find command. Equally, experts won’t like the basics explained. The second problem with big books is that lots of the presented material is not relevant to your need or situation. You haven’t got the C-shell? Throw away a couple of pages. Don’t like the chapter ` vi tips & tricks’ , `Saving time at the commandline’ or `creating custom commands in vi’, then you can skip another 100 pages. Conclusion. Although lot’s of information isn’t relevant to your need, unix-implementation, shell or skill-level, this book is easy to read thanks to the good layout and small paragraphs. The authors truly have years of experience and have made many handy shellscripts. For those of you who want to like to master the commandline of Unix and like to skim for the golden hint, this book is a true find. But if you know what you want to learn then dedicated books present a better alternative to this somewhat unfocussed book.
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|May 15th, 2011 at 5:12 am
If you can only afford one book on Unix, this is the one,
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.
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|May 15th, 2011 at 5:20 am
Good for beginners, too!,
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.
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