This book has many drawbacks: its structure is deficient, the division of the material is sometimes outright confusing, the content lacks rigor and clarity, the examples are badly chosen and there is an overall lack of unity and consistence throughout the book.

Despite its many drawbacks, "Learning the Bash Shell" is still a useful book, simply because there are not that many alternatives. Moreover, the subject itself (i.e. the Bash shell, the Unix OS or both) is inconsistent and confusing.

Good chapter on debugging. Good overview of the Bash shell, but I wish it had more examples. For a book with lots of examples, you might want to consider "Bash Shell: Essential Programs for Your Survival at Work" by Larry L. Smith.

The bash shell is now the most common and featureful command shell in the Unix world. It's full capability certainly isn't obvious to a beginner facing a command prompt, but is well worth exploring. This book is a great place for the novice to start. The first chapter addresses the most fundamental question: just what is a command shell?

The ideal reader already knows at least the names of the emacs and vi editors. That much helps understand the many features and two distinct feature sets available for command line editing. I consider fancy command line editing over-rated for fluent typists, but it's there in the second chapter for all who want it and anyone can benefit from at least a little knowledge of it. After that successive chapters pull the reader deeper into the bash feature set: aliases and shell variables, scripting and shell programming, and debugging when the shell programs or functions go awry.

Since this book is aimed at the novice, Newham and Rosenblatt skip lightly over a few of the more advanced subjects. For example, exceptions and trap handling get only cursory treatment, since they get into deep weirdness very fast. The authors are honest about this shallow treatment, though, and give enough information for a novice to recognize the basics and look them up in more advanced references.

This is nicely organized for the self-taught student. As a result, it's not laid out as a programmer's reference manual - anyone who wants that kind of reference just isn't looking at the right book. For its intended reader, though, it's a great book. It gets readers off to a fast start, and lets them decide just how much they want to bite off at a time. I recommned it very highly.

//wiredweird

This is a useful introduction to the Bash shell used in unix, linux, and other *nix type operating systems. It takes you from a very basic introduction into deeper concepts including shell scripting and customization. Highly recommended for the niche market it is intended to reach. I found it clear, useful and detailed without being dull.

This book (2nd. ed.) shows how bash shell programming exploits special capabilities of linux and unix. Shell programming manages other, more specialized, programs. So understanding the shell is essential to fully exploiting multitasking environments like linux.

This book comfortably covers a complex topic. As software evolves, these skills apply to the TCL shell and the Z shell, too. I am eager to get started on the 3rd. edition of this book.

[A review of the THIRD EDITION 2005.]

In the last 10 years, it appears that the shell wars in unix and linux have settled down. With bash being the clear favourite. So if you are going to invest your time learning any shell, perhaps you should go with bash and maybe use this book as a helper. It shows that script writing in bash is pretty simple. If you already know another shell, like csh or Korn, then the ideas carry over and so too would most of the syntax.

Along the way, the book teaches you more about your operating system. Especially for managing processes/jobs.

My background is as a programmer, so I've never been big on shells and their scripting. But others like you may hark from a sysadmin role and prefer shell activity.

The best book I have ever read on the subject.
The only think I could think to complain about is that
sometimes it was a little hard to follow.
I still give five stars, because the teaching style is great.
a little history, some basic commands, and into shell programing. When you finish the book you will know a lot about how the shell works, Job control and so on.
Also great for linux newbies, But I recamend reading sam`s teach yourself unix in 24 hours first, you will get a good basic understanding of the command line.

The authors spend so much space on extended examples that they make the basics difficult to find. The odd appearance of conditionals is, for instance, the most surprising thing about bash, at least for csh users; their explanation of it is separated by several pages from the main discussion.

I like this book a lot. It covers all you need to know to fell comfortable with bash shell. However I find the explanation confusing, sometimes I had to read the same paragraph twice to figure out what did the author mean. Also it's not good to use as a reference, since a lot of code depends on previous examples, so one needs to go back to find where this came from. All in all a very good book, didn't see better one, so far.

Good starter for those taking their first steps in unix shell scripting. The book is easy to read, with examples that are easy to follow.

For more intricate techniques get the "Unix Power Tools."

This book is an excellent resource for Linux-literate individuals. I use it to tutor students and adults on Bash shell programming. For beginners, it may be too difficult, but the people with hands-on experience will appreciate its content of the each chapter. It lacks real-world examples but with imagination and creativity, you can easily drum up a number of viable samples. This book is not for people who need to be spoon-fed.

O'Reilly has become the de facto for techie books. They are immensely helpful when you just want to dig your feet in and get hardcore with coding. They make for easy reads. Examples are practical and clear.

I find this book to be a great reference tool when working on the Unix command line in the Bash Shell environment. I highly recommend this book if not for reading purposes but as an excellent source of feedback if you are not sure what commands you should be using.

Whilst you do have manpages, which are often handy, this book brings you clarity and elaboration when coding may not come to you that easy as it does for others. Learn Bash without bashing your skull on the keyboard in frustration.

A very good introductory BASH book. The different features of BASH are covered in great detail. Beginners will definitely like the in-depth discussion and examples. The more advanced users will also find this book very useful.

The only reason I'm not giving it a "5 star" is because of the example/case used in Programming section. The author used one example to demonstrate different aspects of BASH programming. I found that example a little too complex for a beginner. Since, the whole programming section was centered around that one example, things got more confusing as advanced programming topics were introduced.
But, still it's a very usefull book.

If you are already using bash, you will probably want to skip parts of the book; nonetheless, it may tell you some shortcuts you missed. There aren't really any large programming examples, though the use of perl probably makes that less of a problem lately. Still, the authors seem to recognize the usefulness of "scripting" directly from the command line. In addition, the book includes a good deal of information on customization and on the differences between versions.

You want to learn Bash, use it, read man pages, whatever. If Bash is the shell you chose, maybe you don't need a book because you can learn what you need at the terminal. I like this book because sometimes I don't have a terminal in front of me, like when I'm sitting on the bus in the morning. So I have this book with me, and I read a few pages rather than stare out the window. It's cheap, so what the heck, if you are a Bash user and feel like there's more to learn then grab it.

This is a great introduction to the Bash shell.
Highly recommended.

This O'Reilly Publication does a good job in filling a void for a good introduction to Bash Shell scripting. Bash has become the shell script programming choice for most Unix and Linux shell programmers, because of its strengths over C shell (Csh) and other Unix-based Shell environments as a fairly robust freeware script programming language.

Strengths of the publication are the clear explanations of the bash shell programming environment, the effective use of tables to summarize basic shell language and programming constructs, UNIX-based utilities, shell environment customization, shell Syntax, Bash File Operators and control key definitions.

A chapter is devoted to edit mode capabilities (both eMacs and Vi Command-Line Editing Commands are covered and summarized effectively in clearly doucmented tables).

The book contains a number of terse script programming tasks, which provide clear examples of the material presented in the text. These program examples are reworked to provide a clear example of how Bash scripts can be modified to provide greater flexibility and reusability of Bash shell program code.

I would like to see more robust programming shell examples in the book as examples of mini-applications, which Bash is frequently used for in many Unix-based or Unix-derived platforms. The "Task 5-1" program example is an example where a good example of a program, which does an adequate job of clearly covering the use of Bash File Operators, yet the author(s) make the statement that the code is "relatively long winded".

Another area the book could address is the use of Bash in a Windows environment. I was able to port some of the programming tasks presented to a Windows 95/98 environment using the GNU Bash Version 2.03 for Windows package available on the internet.

Despite these drawbacks, I rate the book four stars on the strengths that it is the only readily-available publication, which is solely devoted to Bash shell use and programming. The O'Reilly publication is definitely worth the investment, if you are looking for a book to get you started on Bash Shell Script programming on a Unix, Linux or Windows (to a limited degree) environment.

This O'Reilly Publication does a good job in filling a void for a good introduction to Bash Shell scripting. Bash has become the shell script programming choice for most Unix and Linux shell programmers, because of its strengths over C shell (Csh) and other Unix-based Shell environments as a fairly robust freeware script programming language.

Strengths of the publication are the clear explanations of the bash shell programming environment, the effective use of tables to summarize basic shell language and programming constructs, UNIX-based utilities, shell environment customization, shell Syntax, Bash File Operators and control key definitions.

A chapter is devoted to edit mode capabilities (both eMacs and Vi Command-Line Editing Commands are covered and summarized effectively in clearly doucmented tables).

The book contains a number of terse script programming tasks, which provide clear examples of the material presented in the text. These program examples are reworked to provide a clear example of how Bash scripts can be modified to provide greater flexibility and reusability of Bash shell program code.

I would like to see more robust programming shell examples in the book as examples of mini-applications, which Bash is frequently used for in many Unix-based or Unix-derived platforms. The "Task 5-1" program example is an example where a good example of a program, which does an adequate job of clearly covering the use of Bash File Operators, yet the author(s) make the statement that the code is "relatively long winded".

Another area the book could address is the use of Bash in a Windows environment. I was able to port some of the programming tasks presented to a Windows 95/98 environment using the GNU Bash Version 2.03 for Windows package available on the internet.

Despite these drawbacks, I rate the book four stars on the strengths that it is the only readily-available publication, which is solely devoted to Bash shell use and programming. The O'Reilly publication is definitely worth the investment, if you are looking for a book to get you started on Bash Shell Script programming on a Unix, Linux or Windows (to a limited degree) environment.

This book is a good introduction to the Bourne-Again Shell for those absolutely new to it. The book assumes that you already know how to use the basic UNIX utilities, like cat, grep, find, and so on, and it does not attempt to teach them to you, but I think a chapter on them may have been helpful for those just coming to use the bash shell. Configuration tips, syntax and scripting examples make the book a very useful aid to one trying to become comfortable in the Linux world. Nothing spectacular, but it gets the job done.

I found this book pretty useful as an intro to Bash, and bash scripting. I found the first three chapters rather useful to configuring Bash, and the following chapters were useful in showing basic bash shell. I can testify to the usefulness of this book by the fact that I have been able to write several successful bash scripts on my computer. My only complaint was the latter chapters on advanced bash programming. These chapters tended to be somewhat hard to read, and a little confusing (hence the 4 starts). All in all, it was money well spent. :) Thanks Bill and Cameron!

This is a good place to start if you are looking into using the bash shell (unix). The book provides clear cut explanations of all of the commands present in the bash shell. The lack of examples is tolerable, though a little annoying when thoes ever-present half-understandings pop up and a quick example would clear it right up. Making up your own and testing it out works though.

Unfortunately the shell scripting/programming part has been rendered rather useless by the up and rising use of perl for shell scripting. The sections still cover it, but most people scripting for unix shells are using perl because of its simplicity and power.

Overall this is a great book to teach yourself the basics of the bash command line interface in unix, probably the best bash book out there.

Nearly the best book about bash programming. Covers almost every aspect of the bash. Lacks in examples, but thats not a matter, because the author describes all the functions very well.

This book is aimmed at beginners, but goes into enough depth to get you truly on your way. It explanations of commands, and concepts are very clear and concise. Also, I like how the authors initially in the book go over and explain commands several times, as this makes remembering the syntax of commands much simplier (for someone with bad memory, like me).

One criticism is the lack of decent examples, when they are given. All the examples seem to be oversimply or non-real-world, and I feel the authors could make concepts clearer by including more examples.

To sum up, this is not a book for you if you learn by trial-and-error and examples, but if you don't mind the lack of decent examples, then this book is a good unix shell programming book.

I review the book from a Unix beginners perspective. I havent finished reading the book yet, but I just cant resist sharing my positive feelings about it. It might very well be true that the book lacks real world examples, as the other reviewers point out. But let me balance this criticism by highliting great strengths that the book has (at least for newcomers to Unix like me). Picking up this book, I had very little knowledge of Unix and I had not read any book on shell programming before. I used to be very sceptical about working with shells having grown up with the easiness of use of GUIs like MS Windows. Thanks to this book I am now dying to get my hands on Linux to start using the Bash shell (for now, I am using Cygwin under NT). The book answers all the questions I used to have about Unix as I was programming on the Solaris platform. Because of this book, I am now deeply fascinated by the simplicity and power of Unix! I want to send my sincere gratitude to the authors!

Learning the Bash Shell, should be not be called a learning book. The lack of real world examples really hurt this book. I found Unix Shells by Example a much better learning tool for the Bash Shell. This was surprising, since other learning books by O'Reilly are considerably better than this one.

This book does provide some help for BASH beginners, but lacks reference material and real world examples of BASH Shell programming. Any programming book SHOULD include real world examples OR complete reference material to be considered quality material. This book does NOT make the grade

I just finished this book, and I have to say it was definitely worth the money. The authors do a more than credible job of describing the fundamentals of bash without going too deeply into technical minutiae. Not that they don't present some complex examples! I appreciated the fact that the examples in early chapters were revisited and augmented in later chapters as more complex material was presented. People who prefer thick reference-type compendiums that need not be read in a linear fashion may dislike this, but I found it to be quite helpful.

Particularly illuminating was the image manipulation script they used as an example in several chapters. It really gave me an idea of the power of scripting. Unfortunately, obtaining the source code for the tools the example relied on and compiling them turned out to be a chore; I finally gave up. Still, I had no problem understanding the example even without actually being able to implement it. And there were plenty of other examples that didn't rely on non-standard unix utilities.

If I had to make a single criticism, I'd say that the book could focus a bit more on *interactive* shell use, and why bash is better/worse than other shells in interactive mode. Being a former tcsh user who has developed lots of aliases and programmed completions over time, it would've been helpful to have a section called "Migrating from Csh" or something like that...