The C Programming Language (2nd Edition)

Unix in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference for SVR4 and Solaris 7 (3rd Edition)

Unix

UNIX for Programmers and Users (3rd Edition)

Format: Paperback
Author: Graham Glass
ReleaseDate: 06 February, 2003
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Rating:

Good book, surprised at the sender
Just surprised at the location of sender, it is in Taiwan, not California as displayed on the web site. I received the book quickly, and the quality of the book is very good. And the shipping label was not clear, the manager of the apartment and I were very, very difficult to read the receiver's name, and almost cannot see the address. Anyway, I think this is good seller based on the time of shipping process and the quality of the book.

Expensive but good
Bookstore shelves are usually crowded with books that deal with the admin part of Unix but good programming books are a tad harder to find. I had to port some Windows C/C++ code to Solaris and went to the bookstore hoping to find something that would bring me up to speed with the basic utilities and UNIX concepts from the perspective of a programmer.

The first few chapters about the commonly used utilities quickly taught me to navigate the system but a full 4 chapters are devoted to the shell - a general introduction, bsh, ksh and csh - which was too much for me. I skipped the ksh and csh chapters. Also the systems programming chapters goes into a lot of detail about files most of which I already knew. If you, like me are a Windows programmer making a transition to Unix, be prepared to wade through and often skip stuff you already know. The good thing however is that the writing style is lucid and clear and this book is an easy read. Introduction to file permissions(chown etc) is very well written. Examples are clear and well placed. The brief introductions to perl and awk are also useful.

Though the price is on the higher side, I think this book is a good buy. Its kept me interested and reading for over a week now and I must say I know so much more Unix for that. If it had been priced say 10-12 dollars lower, I might have given this baby a 4 on 5.

Very good book for people new to UNIX
This book does a good job explaining the basics and some intermediate topics. I have the first edition of this book, and used it in college. I particularly enjoyed chapters on system programming and unix internals. Also, the book serves as a good reference.

Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who wants to start out with UNIX.