Unix: Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Easy and simple reading
Review: The book covers essential components of unix. it serves as quick reference book to solve day to day unix problems.

Rating:
Summary: Very practical, reference-like
Review: The book is easy to use and understand, good choice for beginners, but might be a bit wordy for advanced users.

Its structure is very similar to a reference book, runs along the UNIX commands in 17 chapters, and provides enough information and examples to their usage. It contains three appendices summarizing the UNIX files and directories, the UNIX commands and their flags. It contains no theoretic essays at all, so if you are interested in the inner working or philosophy of UNIX, this book is not for you.

I liked that it uses a color (red) to distinguish the commands and flags from the output. I was glad to find links to the related topics inside the book, but missed a bibliography. And I missed one or more full chapters paying attention to the most popular implementations such as Solaris, AIX.


Rating:
Summary: Watch out for mistakes
Review: There are a lot of mistakes in this book, some are typo, some are more serious especially in scripts, making it not a good reference. For people who are beyond novice/casual users, I'd not suggest this book. For beginners though, it's well organized and easy to digest.

Rating:
Summary: Useful book
Review: This book contains a lot of worthless material due to the fact that my job does not require knowing, such as the topics on the internet, e-mail, and installing UNIX software, but of course, for other users this stuff might be useful. The small bit of information that was useful has certainly made a large difference in my daily workings with UNIX, which more than compensates for the sections that were not useful. Such topics include the uses of the semicolon, piping, redirecting, and scripts. The book is easy to read, sells at a good price, and contains good reference appendixes.

Rating:
Summary: Best Basic Unix Reference
Review: This is a concise, readable, practical guide to all of the fundamental things one needs to do in Unix. It's excellent. I consider myself an intermediate Unix user and I still use it all the time. Any nerdy author can write a Unix book, these authors really understand how to communicate Unix in a way that's efficient for the reader. 6 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Good starting point.
Review: This is a good starting point to study unix. No unix background required. If you want something shorter than you need "Learning the Unix Operating System" O'Reilly ISBN: 1565923901

Rating:
Summary: Concise and To the Point
Review: This is one of the best UNIX books I've seen. For those that have some background in Unix but would like to learn more advance techniques, this is the ideal book. It can serve as a good reference as well. It will worth your money!

Rating:
Summary: good book
Review: very helpful. taking a course in unix sys admin. with no unix background and this was my starting point. easy to read. read from cover to cover in 3 days.