I am very pleased to have such an excellent book. So far I have learnt so much about UNIX/Linux from this book

As a former Bell Labs Engineer, I have tasted most of the flavors of Unix. As a computer science professor for 18 years, this is the best book that I have used. The Self-test and exercises gives the user a structured approach to learning Unix, which doesn't always happen in the Unix world. The examples in the text are easy to interpret and the author provides several variations of the commands. The book has an extra bonus with the perl, system administration and TCP/IP sections.

I like easy to read books and I also had assumed that learning UNIX is not necessarily has to be a struggle. This book stood up to my expectations almost perfectly: it is very well written and clearly expressed work. It does not overwhelm with technical details and does not press too much. I also followed an advise in someone review and purchased "UNIX Essentials" DVD that is complete unix course recorded. These two nicely complement one another. You watch it and you read it. If you didn't catch it from the first try you watch it again and read it again. In two months I found myself confident to that extend that gave advises to our system administrator and he accepted them because there were subjects that he wasn't completely sure. What I can say, in three month I passed my first interview and got a job! Sure it is a way to start there much of more advanced reading that will take over you with a time however these two provide you with the BASIS!
I can't overstate how much I have learned from them. Don't be naive, though. You will have to learn and memorize many things. The fact of owning neither book nor DVD will not make you knowledgeable, but if you will work it trough, there is a chance you will surprise many people around!

(Opps, can I use that word here ?). This is the only book you need for a beginner's to itermediate course. I have a degree in Mathematics plus C and VB programming background plus tones of work experience, but was devestated with "Distributed Computing" (UNIX) tutors, who simply forgot to do a "Train the Trainer" course before accepting the job offer! Anyway, this excellant book has the following strengh: (1) Covering almost all topics even the more obsure unix usage like XARG stuff (2) Appropriate lay-out for easy study & referene (3) concise but just enough details of explanation with PRECISION, so it takes guess work out of your study. I have been buying books from Amazon for years, but this is the first review I wrote, 'cause I owe it to the author !! Hay sumitabha, are you gonna write any other books on C++, c#.net, VB.net, or Java ?

As a n00b starting fresh, this was the book of choice for my unix class. I find this book very good on teaching me the fundamentals of the world of unix and it has me wanting more. Everything is easy to understand, and the self-test questions at the end of the chapters keeps me challenged. I recommend this to anyone wanting to get a good start on learning unix

Windows users are always scared away when they get near to Unix. One reason is the command line interface and difficult to use documentation (try man find). A need was felt for a guide which can help GUI users to shift back to their DOS days.

This book exactly fills in that gap. It reminds you of those old DOS book by Peter Norton etc which go through every topic in their respsective field. This book helps in giving a very fundamental understanding of Unix use.

It covers a lot of topics and also points out differences among the various implementaions of Unix at appropriate times. From using a simple command like ls, it goes onto using Perl for System Administration tasks. In between it covers topics like redirection, regular expressions, pagers etc. in adequate detail. It is a must read for beginners and will also be useful for advanced users to tone up their skills once in a while.

This author knows what the reader needs to learn & how best to accomplish it.
Not only does this book cover a superbly WIDE amount of essential topics (e.g. Internet server, Perl), but it achives
the author's goal of covering things in an order that is
more realistically use-able.
Also, the thousand questions make it ideal for self-study or a class textbook. I can't find any other Unix book that as overall good at this one (and I've looked at them all!).

The content of this book is abundant and almost covers all the field of Unix, like basic operating, administration, shell script, network... etc. The paragraph can be understood easily. Beside the common command of Unix, it also introduce some thing like perl. Although it didn't recover the world of Unix deeply, it is really worth to be read by beginners who want to understand the world of Unix.