UNIX for the Impatient (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Great for the not-quite-beginner
Review: This is a great book, but it's not for the Unix novice. For them, there's Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours. After you get through that, buy this book. I'm a 20-year mainframe veteran who last saw Unix in college, before it had nice things like shell scripts. This book was overwhelming when I first returned to the Unix world; however, after a little experience, this book is an easy and incredibly informative read.

Rating:
Summary: Great introductory and reference book on UNIX
Review: This is a very good introductory book on UNIX -- it is definitely targeted towards computer literate readers that are new to UNIX (i.e. it goes into detail fast and does not waste space to explain trivial details). I was fortunate to use the first edition when I was a UNIX novice and I use the second edition now for reference.

Rating:
Summary: The best Unix introduction for computer-literate readers
Review: This is one of those rare books that does exactly what it claims. I have programmed in many languages and used many operating systems; I didn't need a book that explains what a file or a directory is. What I wanted was a book that let me map my previous knowledge of other OS's to UNIX: how do I cut out a column of info from text file? How do I use the file security methods? What can I find out about my running processes? How can I get a job to run in the background? For questions like this the book is perfect. It assumes you know about computers but don't know UNIX. This is probably the single most useful computer reference book I own. If this book doesn't meet your needs, then you're on your way to being a power user, in which case I recommend the O'Reilly "UNIX Power Tools" book.