This is a great book for learning by example, particularly as a follow-on to something more geared toward complete beginners to get you started. It provides a number of useful scripts (even though some of them duplicate functionality of common system utilities), with explanations of how and why they work, and even notes on how you might alter the code to suit your own purposes. If you're a relatively new programmer or system administrator that already has the basics of shell scripting in mind, but find yourself at loose ends wondering what to do next to help cement what you know and start learning more, this book may be exactly what you need. It's also useful for figuring out some of the basic principles of translating code to or from some other programming language, thanks to the code explanations.

The scripts themselves, however, are not exactly what I would call "wicked cool". The title is an obvious marketing conceit, designed to make the book seem more enticing. Most of the scripts, in fact, are surprisingly mundane -- but that doesn't mean they aren't useful. You may actually find yourself using some of them, with minor alterations, in your day-to-day life. Just don't expect to be wowed by the scripts themselves.

If you've read my review of Wicked Cool Perl Scripts, you may note that this is an almost word-for-word duplication. That was intentional: the books are very similar in quality, format, and usefulness, right down to the "wicked coolness" (or not) of the scripts.

This is a collection of very basic shell scripts I found completely useless. The author presents the book in an advanced format, not giving much underlying information or hand-holding; however the information contained is very beginner level.

The author David Taylor also has many bad habits in his scripting and tends to take a wordy approach. Many of the scripts Taylor advertises in his book can be compiled into a command or two on a single small line of code. For example why would you pipe a grep command to awk when awk has a more powerful search function than grep already built in?

I did not find any advanced commands in his entire book. There were a couple very basic 'sed' and 'awk' commands but nothing which made me think anything about them was 'wicked cool'

Taylor does some neat stuff with shell scripts, but he doesn't spend much time explaining what goes on in them. Each is accompanied by a terse paragraph explaining "how it works", which generally only addresses one particular aspect of the script (ie, POSIX-style "variable slicing"). Shell syntax is terse and many of the reserved keywords and functions are not self-evident. If you don't know, for example, what "${#remainder}" returns, Taylor won't help you; you will have to look it up in a tutorial or a reference work elsewhere.

According to the blurb on the back of the book, Taylor has an MA in education, but there is little evidence of his didactic skills in this text. On the face of it, he is more a geek than a teacher, and hence this book more useful to his fellow hackers than people new to Bash.

I have spent thousands of dollars on computer and technical references; I have a library full of them. There is one book however that sits on my office desk and has never made it to the library - Wicked Cool Shell Scripts. I have read, referenced and recommended it many times.

The book is extremely informative and is written in such a way that it can be very valuable, whether your a brand new shell script programmer or are an experienced administrator looking for a better way to accomplish a task. I have used ideas and methods from the book to streamline tasks that I do regularly and to improve the scripts I already use. It has been, by far, the best investment in a reference book I have ever made and was enjoyable enough to read cover to cover.

If your IT reference shelf is full, throw something out and fill the space with this book.

WICKED COOL SHELL SCRIPTS is a collection of pre-made bash scripts for various tasks similar to one of O'Reilly's "cookbooks". All scripts here use bash--the author rejects csh because of Tom Christiansen's classic essay "Csh Programming Considered Harmful" and the Korn shell because he considers it fine for interactive use but not so good for scripting.

The basic format of each entry is first the problem--what the user wants to do--then the code, followed sometimes by an explanation and advice on hacking the code. The book is not really an introduction to Bash scripting. If you want a systematic primer I'd recommend O'Reilly's LEARNING THE BASH SHELL or any of a dozen libre tutorials.

Some of the scripts are useful and solve problems I've occasionally faced. For example, the GNU units program can't do temperature conversions, but a script is given here which uses bc to provide a solution. Quite elegant is a script with which the user can find the time anywhere in the world by querying in a friendly manner the system's zoneinfo files. In spite of some neat gimmicks, however, I don't think I can really recommend the book unless you're someone about to take a voyage on the south seas and won't have Internet access. Many of these scripts can be found on the Web, and far too many scripts here solve problems already long solved by available programs. The author describes a secure version of locate, when slocate is already easily installable on most *nix systems. A script for rotating log files is done when metalog and other common log programs do this automatically. Take out all these unnecessary scripts, and the amount of useful content in the book turns out to be very low indeed.