Linux Shell Scripting with Bash

This is definitely a good intermediate level book on bash. Which is a pretty rare breed of bash books :-) The book is one of the few that treat bash as a programming language. And bash in reality is a yet another scripting language, along with being a glue toUnix commands and command like interpreter.Each chapter has a reference section at the end. Unfortunately they are pretty much useless, but you can buy any previous edition of Sobel book for a couple of bucks instead.I think the level of the book is intermediate and the book will be most useful not for absolute novices, but for entry level system administrators, who already know some bash and who what to improve their skills and write better scripts.While written in 2004, the content covers some modern features of bash albeit not always correctly ;-) . The author pays attention to important but rarely understood details of bash language (and it is a complex non-orthogonal scripting language, along with being command interpreter). this dual nature of bash is the major issue in writing a good bash textbook, as it is difficult to cover both and they generally use slightly different style of expressions. .the book covers such model features of bash as declare statement, "let" keyword (which allow wring arithmetic expressions and ((...)) which allow both arithmetic expression and arithmetic comparisons), C-style for loop and some other. Coverage of "let" (chapter 6) is bad and tit look like the author does not understand all nuances correctly, but it is better than nothing :-)In treating bash as a regular scripting language this books competes with very few books that use similar approach. Out of my head I can name just a couple: 4-- Classic Shell Scripting by Arnold Robbins, Nelson H.F. Beebe (2005)-- Pro Bash Programming Scripting the GNU-Linux Shell, Second Edition by Chris F. A. Johnson & Jayant Varma (2015).And despite the fact that the latter book was published in 2015, some elements of the language (for example, integer variables) are treated better in this book, which was published 11 years earlier, in 2004.The book also covers some pretty exotic areas of shell programming such as writing interactive programs. And does it well. At the same time that means that some parts of the books can (and probably should) be skipped on the first reading.Sometimes the author delves into areas that have very little value even for advanced bash programmer. That's a drawback of the book but those section can be simply skipped. Moreover some of such exotic section on the second reading actually have some value, for example you that you can use "command" directive to execute actual command even if you defined an alias of function with the same name.The author also explains some security issues connected with the scripts. And provides several amusing anecdotes of sysadmin blunders, some of which can be includes into "sysadmin horror stories" book.The books has a chapter on Web programming in which the author shows that bash can be used for simple web access operations. That's another very positive feature of the book.At the same time this is definitely not an advanced book. The author lacks understanding of bash internals and his understanding of some advanced features such as eval and co-process communication is superficial, to say the best. Some of his explanations are simply wrong and some are questionable (Let keyword and double quote strings comes to mind). There is little in the book that can help you to write complex scripts.You probably would be better off learning by example, using for example some well written open source program such as Relax_and_restore (which also contains useful style guide).All-in-all explanations are frozen on intermediate level (level of a regular college course on shell) and interplay of features and bash warts are not mentioned.the overview of the language is inconsistent and examples are badly written: the author introduces arithmetic expressions and double square quotes notation and then used obsolete single square notation almost everywhere. That's why I deducted one star.Essentially for the overview of the language you can find a better books. But coverage of more complex topics in chapters 8-17 is commendable and impressive.All in all, I would recommend this book as an intermediate text covering bash mainly as a programming language, not so much as a command line interpreter (although the book contains some unique tips for this area too; for example about interaction of bash and GNU readline with its infamous inputrc file; the author shows some interesting examples of bind command usage; although they might not work with bash 4.2 and modern version of readline, they still have some educational value ).

Nice POSIX examples. Yes, I'm nit-picking, but the cover says the book is "comprehensive" and a comprehensive book is 800 pages, not 412 pages. You might also want to consider "Bash Shell: Essential Programs for Your Survival at Work" by Larry L. Smith

Arrived, excellent

I have found the book to be very helpful, well organized, and have just the right amount and choice of information. It was easy to follow, and using it as a reference I've built many complex shell scripts.

This book has exactly what I was looking and more.Excellent book.I like the reference section at the end of each chapter, because sometimes I only need syntax.

Learning BASH on Linux. Have 3 boxes with Linux. New job, need Bash scripts.Also LPic-1 exams too. exam 117-101

Very prompt service! Description matched the item I received.

Old; Confusing; Obfuscates even basic syntax. Crap reference when it came out in 2005 and still pos.

Very good overview of the Bash Shell well written and with nice explanations of how Bash works.Nice book and in good state.

This is a good book. If you want to learn Linux Shell scripting, this is your book.

It's darn long to get this book shipped, Im sure it worth it, so buy it godamn! That way it can be shipped more often and more faster :P