I'd recommend this book highly for anyone who wants to understand scripting even just a little bit, or just be more of a power-user of Linux, Unix, or OS X. It's written clearly and simply enough for almost anyone to understand it, and anyone will find some use for at least a few of the scripts presented. For more hardcore scripters, it may not have anything new in the code, but the book's approach to automating tasks is still pretty inspiring.

I'm an IT Manager with a lot of experience in admin, less in programming. But how can you avoid having to understand shell scripting? You can't, but like everything else, if you do it rarely it's hard to remember everything--and you don't always think "I can write a script to do that" even when it's the best solution to a problem.

Mostly in the past I've only edited existing scripts, or written half-baked ones to automate a single repetitive task (for file in * ...). Since buying this book, I'm saving myself time and even making a little money writing scripts, and I'm thoroughly enjoying every minute of it. I feel like I'm getting smarter again, and this book is a big part of that.

I think it'll also be especially helpful to OS X users who want to be more knowledgeable about Unix and what their computers are capable of now. Other good targets are webmasters, administrators of small to medium-sized networks (including home networks), and anyone who just wants to be more of a power-user.

You know what I like best about this book? It reminds me of the time when the computer users I knew ALL knew how to program--when the point of using a computer was to program it. We're still there, we just forgot about it. You can be that powerful of a user, still, and this book will get you there.

Googling for scripts is free and you can find numerous scripts in the realm you're interested in. The scripts are interesting, but it's impractical to ever use them in your profession. Of the scripts listed in the book, I only found one that I plan on using (the grep that outputs lines above and below the found text). The majority of others I didn't even read because they're frivolous.

I don't see what the 20+ others see in this book to give it such a high rating.

I am new to Linux and scripting but I have made leaps and bounds writing these scripts. Dave Taylor does a wonderful job of explaining how the scripts work and whatever I didn't understand, I was able to look up. I recommend it to anyone who learns by doing.

Within many online forums, myself and the author have managed to be confrontational and I approached reading this book with the full intent of trashing it. Sadly, I failed at my quest and found it to be of the highest quality. Dave really knows his stuff and went out of his way to provide value to his readers.

I recommend this book to Unix / Linux administrators in corporate America who want to quickly increase their productivity and recommend that they run not walk to the nearest bookstore and pick up a copy. Don't even wait for Amazon to ship it...

(...)

Kirk McElhearn's "The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood" recommended this book for those who want to take shell scripting deeper (along with a Perl book) and I'm glad he did. There's a lot of ground Dave Taylor covers and by design the 101 scripts are surprisingly helpful for day-to-day usage and computer management. As Mr. Taylor writes in his intro, the quality of the scripts in this book far surpass what you might find after spending a lot of time Googling and then tweaking for your platform. He understands the differences of the various platforms and how you should tweak accordingly. The author has a lively writing style (particularly for a computer book).

This is one of those rare reference books that really needs to be on the reference shelf.

It is nice , excellent book for experienced user. I found it to be the nice, logical continuation to "UNIX essentials" DVD course that I found here on Amazon. They supplement one another very nicely and helpfully.
It is easy to read and follow, the examples are clear and well described. Overall very nice effort!

I have not found any other book that has so many examples of scripts. It is easy to understand if you have been working with Linux for sometime.
It is a vry good book and can't stop reading it:)

Another one of my goals this year is to get familiar with Linux and shell scripting. I have some "how to" books, but I also picked up Dave Taylor's Wicked Cool Shell Scripts - 101 Scripts For Linux, Mac OS X, and UNIX Systems (No Starch Press). Taylor's done a great job with this book.

Chapter List: Introduction; The Missing Code Library; Improving on User Commands; Creating Utilities; Tweaking Unix; System Administration: Managing Users; System Administration: System Maintenance; Web and Internet Users; Webmaster Hacks; Web and Internet Administration; Internet Server Administration; Mac OS X Scripts; Shell Script Fun and Games; Afterword; Index

Taylor didn't write this book as a tutorial on script writing. Rather, he wanted to provide a "cookbook" of scripts that people could learn from and use immediately. He also wanted something more interesting than the scripts normally found in the how to books on the market. I'd agree that he's accomplished his purpose. Each script starts with a listing of the code and an explanation of how it works. He shows you how to run the script and what the results of running the script should be. Finally, there's a "hacking the script" paragraph that explains how you might want to modify the script to do something different. This entire package of paragraphs in each script serves as a sort of "mini-lesson" on some aspect of script writing.

As I mentioned above, I'm not quite ready for this book right now. When I pick up some fundamentals, I'll be heading into the Web and Internet Users section. There's code there on using Lynx and shell scripts to strip out information from websites. I have a project in mind I've wanted to do for some time, and I think I finally found the tools that will allow me to do it.

As a side note: LinuxWorld Magazine voted this book the Best Shell Script Programming Book of 2004. So I'm not the only one who thinks it's pretty good...

A well-written book packed with a ton of practical information. If you have a background in shell scripting and you want to stretch a little, this is the book for you...

This is a great book on Unix shell scripting. The book is loaded with useful scripts and I was even able to use some of the ideas presented in this book to make my own scripts perform much more efficiently. At one point I got stuck with one of the scripts so I emailed the author and he got back to me with a fix within a couple of days. Turned out to be a quirk with the Solaris 8 version of the operating system. I would recommend this book to anyone who works with Unix systems.

I've been using this book to learn Unix scripting. By writing the scripts in the book and seeing them work you get an understaning of how the script functions. By taking pieces of different scripts and using them in your own you can build up a good understanding of scripting concepts. I've tried several books and this one is at the top of my list!

I guess it's always difficult deciding on whether to buy a techy book like this one - particularly if you're ordering on the web. Fortunately, I bought my copy from one of those old-fashioned book shops and was able to browse through the scripts before making the decision :-)

This book has some very useful scripts in it. They probably won't be *exactly* what you're looking for, but they are good examples that can easily be adapted and appended to help you work smarter/faster.

The accompanying descriptions are written so that those who are unfamiliar with the shell will have enough information to get the scripts up and running - and those who are familiar with the shell won't feel patronized.

Being a Mac scripter myself, I also like the fact that the author *likes* OS X and has included lots of OS X-specific information in the book.

This would be a useful addition to the library of a Mac user who wants to move from plain *user* to *power-user* :-)

This is a wonderful book to explain how to script. It gives a whole bunch of good examples with detailed explanations on what scripts are doing. It is perfect for the person whom wants to get their feet wet scripting in Linux or Mac OS X.

I found the book easy to use and very helpful as I relearn Unix and Unix Scripting.

I am a technical trainer for Fortune 500 companies and have been searching for a scripts that would allow my students to go from theory to application.

Dave Taylor's book gave me the foundation that I needed and in a few moments I was able to modify the provided scripts to run in another UNIX shell and extended the validation test to limit the number of characters as well as emulate an input mask for a SSN.

If you only get one book on scripting this would be the one to add to your library.

Shell scripting was always one of those things that slightly turned me off. Because of my aversion to it, it seemed to keep me from ever feeling like a platform guru. (Don't get me wrong. Just because you can write shell script, doesn't mean you are a platform guru.)

Just one hour with Dave's book and things really begin to change. I don't recommend reading this cover-to-cover. It's the book you flip open and decide that you will invest an hour and learn to do something cool that you've never done before. Because of the breadth of examples, it's hard not to get excited about doing something new.

Since I've been playing around with the book, I've not only gotten over the hurdle of feeling comfortable about shell script in general. But, I've had a lot of fun and done some cool things that I've never done before. I've written scripts to automatically update a remote ftp server. I've written scripts to grab a bunch of stock data off the web. Finally, I've written a script to gather information about 3,000 high-tech companies. Pretty cool stuff!

If you have been weary of getting into shell scripting for whatever reason, this book is most likely a fun way to start getting some experience.

For someone rather new to shell scripting this book was just what I needed. Having started off with Learning the BASH Shell, I grabbed Dave's book to what what else I could and add to my library of scripts. What this book pointed out to me was the wide range of applications that scripting is usefull for. Being someone new to a *NIX system, part of my problem has been just knowing what can/should be done with a script....This book solved part of that problem.

The only reason this didn't get 5 stars was that I could've used more line-by-line reasoning (like a "PERL by Example" book). I can understand that this would've made the book about 5x longer though...

Anyways, overall a good read, but most of all it got me to THINK about using scripts in my everyday programming.

I like writing scripts to monitor my systems and networks, but, I am not a good scripter :-) Dave's book is now one of my power tool collections.

Shell scripts are one of the building blocks that makes UNIX (all flavors) so fundamentally powerful. Some look down on the shell script and feel that it is to simple a tool. A review of any of the shells man pages will quickly show the range of activities one can accomplish with a _simple_ shell script. It's automation of the command prompt and is only limited by your imagination and understanding of UNIX.

Dave Taylor has put together 101 shell scripts covering a multitude of topics for the many different UNIX platforms (OSX included). This is more than a shell game (pun intended) for Dave. It is quite apparent that he is a quality educator and writer who believes a proper context is a must for learning. The added benefit is that at times this may help make the learning process transparent.

You will need at least some basic understanding of UNIX commands and shell scripting before this book will be useful. Dave doesn't intend it to be a command reference book or a shell howto but rather a "cookbook" utilizing real world scripts that may simplify your life while teaching you a thing or two. If you are new to UNIX or shell scripting there are many introductory books and/or web tutorials that you should start with before moving onto this book.

The format and functionality of Wicked Cool Shell Scripts doesn't lend to reading it as a novel. Scan the table of contents and pick out the scripts that catch your attention or that cover issues you are currently dealing with. No matter how you read it, Wicked Cool Shell Scripts will either put a few more skills in your drawer or sharpen some of your old ones.

This was a great technical reference to experience. I was impressed with the explanation of the code as well as explanation of how to augment the code. The author has spend quite a bit of time looking into the repercussions of some "hacks" to certain scripts that could make a system vulnerable to attack. This is definitely one of the best compilations of shell scripts that I have seen. I will personally be using some of the scripts in the book to make my life easier, such as script #42 (Improving readability of DF) and #52 (Killing processes by name). This book is a fun read as well as an important piece of arsenal for the bookshelf.

This is one of those "should have on your desk" books. The book and Dave's website is a great little resource.

I wanted to do some statistical work and though I was going to have to break down and use Excel or Calc. Then I ran into Dave's book/website. After a little reading, I realize it was possible to nix Excel.

Using a couple of Dave's tricks and his scriptbc tool, I had the job done. All shell sans Excel. Nice book, nice website --really useful.

This is a fun little book of 101 shell scripts for *nix systems. The scripts are indeed cool, and some are very useful. Unfortunately the code isn't hilighted, so it can be difficult to read when it's spread across multiple pages. The commenting and explanations are somewhat uneven.

That being said. It is a fun book and it can be useful. Just make sure you check the table of contents so that you know you are getting a few scripts you can use.

Folks, if scripts intimidate you in any way, this book is great! It brings practical scripts in a wide variety of areas to you. Once you learn these scripts, it's easy to customize them to meet your needs.

If you're really interested in becoming a Linux Sysadmin, you need to know how to script. Once you learn these scripts, you'll be able to demonstrate your knowledge on any interview!

The book is aimed at all users and systems administrators of linux and every unix variant, including most importantly the MacOS. If you already know some scripting, you should be quite at ease here. Taylor does decide to restrict his discussion to the Bourne shell and its descendent, bash. He drops the C shell! But, as he points out, the scripts he gives can be easily rewritten in the latter if you desire.

The book can be roughly divided into two parts. The first is essentially traditional scripting tasks. A user from 1988 would see original material here, but no qualitative surprises.

The second half of the book is more interesting. It centres on Web applications. For example, when running a Web server that uses CGI, Perl and C are often the choice for implementing logic. But sometimes you can get by with a simpler approach - using a Bourne shell. Taylor shows how to do this to make simple web pages, with images, even. Cool! Though this outlook lacks the full expressive power of generating dynamic pages via Java Server Pages/Servlets, these latter alternatives can be quite forbidding to learn. If you are already comfortable with sed, awk, grep [etc], you may want to try this approach, provided your web site is not too complex.

In summary, the web scripting approach suggested here may be the most distinctive and useful sections. Worth checking out.

I first laid eyes upon this book at a computer show; the publisher had a paper copy. This is a cool publisher with alot of cool books and as I browsed this one I realized that this was going to be another one. Yipppeee! It's finally out and it's even better with the real cover :)

Okay, seriously now. This is a great book. Gets right to the point and it's much more fun to ready than other scripting books that I've seen. You get alot in a little space.

I often take a dim view of books that use superlatives in their titles. I also don't think there is anything "wicked cool" about shell scripting in general: if you need anything complex at all, Perl or something else is probably a much better way to to it. Shell scripting gets awfully nasty awfully fast.

However, I was wrong. Yes, shell scripting is an abominable way to approach most of the tasks this book explores. Just the same, the author does it "wicked cool" and you can learn a lot both from how he sees the problem and the other Unix tools he uses as part of the script. So while you might shudder at the idea of writing a link-checker in Bash, the author's clever use of Lynx's "traverse" flag is something you might make use of elsewhere. You'll find useful things like that throughout the book, and even if you'd rather write it in Perl or whatever, the logic is worth examining.

Mac OS X users will appreciate that a whole chapter is devoted to that. There's nothing particularly deep there, nothing you will be surprised by, but it's nice to see Mac get specific mention. That brings up another important point: shells are different and Unixes are different. The author does pay a lot of attention to the differences that can cause problems for your scripts when they need to run on different platforms.