[NBLUG/talk] I want to learn shell scripting.

Troy Arnold fryman at sonic.net
Fri May 7 17:23:33 PDT 2004


On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 04:59:29PM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 04:55:37PM -0700, Dave Sisley wrote:
> > I am soliciting recommendations for a good book or web-based tutorial
> > that can get me going. As an example, I really enjoyed going through
> > O'Reilly's 'Learning Perl' (llama); it was a good mix of information
> > and little exercises to show you how things work.
> 
> For really fun shell scripting check out O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools"
> (the big thick book with the power-drill on the front)

Oooh, good call, Bill.  That's a neat book with lots of tidbits suitable
for random browsing.

I think O'Reilly's _Learning the Bash Shell_ is a good book.  Although
it doesn't have the humor of the Perl books, it is a good book for
beginners and beyond.  It is pretty complete and has some juicy stuff
later on.  Get through that, and you'll know bash.

Bash (or any other shell scripting language) is just the glue pasting
all the other little toys in the unix toolbox together.  It's incomplete
to learn shell scripting without spending some time learning
find,head,tail,cut,paste,grep,sort and friends.  That's where _Unix
Power Tools_ shines. 

Also, I found O'Reilly's _Unix in a Nutshell_ to be a super reference.
I spent many a joyous hour finding new tools in that old book.  There
is probably something more current now.

-troy 




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