sed & awk (2nd Edition)

Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition

UNIX(R) Shells by Example (4th Edition) (By Example)

The UNIX Programming Environment

Learning the vi Editor (6th Edition)

Shell

Portable Shell Programming: An Extensive Collection of Bourne Shell Examples

Format: Paperback
Author: Bruce Blinn
ReleaseDate: 19 October, 1995
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Rating:

The scripting and the book are BOTH portable.
The book covers all the important elements. The scripting and the book are BOTH portable. Anything you forget is easily found in seconds maybe 1-2 minutes sometimes. It easily fits in any pocket of a laptop bag or backpack or briefcase for the time when you need a well organized shell scripting book at a moments notice. I rarely go anywhere without it.

The K&R of Shell Programming
Blinn delivers a terse writing style that is clear and concise; reminiscent of the seminal text on C programming by Kernighan and Ritchie. If there is a book that better deserves this title, I am not aware of it.

Like K&R, this text may not be your single resource for learning how to write code, however, over the years as you develop coding skills, Blinn will grow with you, becoming your favorite reference for shell programming idioms.

Blinn covers "real" shell programming; i. e. Bourne Shell based programming. Please try to avoid scarring your brain with csh based programming, if possible. If you want to program in sh, ksh, or bash, then this is the book for you. .

excellent
I only gave this book 4 stars although it really deserves more, because it may not live up to the expectations of some readers. If you've done any intoductory shell programming at all, this book will get you started in more serious shell programming efforts.

Only the Bourne shell is covered, because it's the most portable. It covers all the basics and many advanced issues. The authors philosphy is to teach by example, and this book is full of examples and sample code.

The first half of the book is a down and dirty "How To by Example. " The examples are general enough and well enough documented that the use for the syntaxes described remains clear in the readers mind. The second half of the book contains some sample shell utilities. These are shell programs that were written to mimmick or epxpand on functionality of common UNIX commands. I found the first half of the book to be the most useful over time.

Some explanations may be a bit terse for brand new shell prgrammers. Awk is covered in much detail at all, although there are some very nice examples of using sed. All in all this is the best shell programming reference I've seen.