Rating: 
Summary: Excellent! But be careful of your expectations.
Review: .. to be much use in reality. Scant information interspersed with tiresome and even occassionally glib remarks. A very disappointing book for two reasons; the amount of information provided and the style in which author eeks it out.
Rating: 
Summary: not enough information
Review: .. to be much use in reality. Scant information interspersed with tiresome and even occassionally glib remarks. A very disappointing book for two reasons; the amount of information provided and the style in which author eeks it out.
Rating:
Summary: A Perfect Supplement for the *nix Novice
Review: After using Linux and Solaris at different jobs for the past year, I had enough knowledge to get around and write my Perl programs. I bought 'Think Unix' to give me the background and understanding that would help me to become a 'Power User' with this OS. I was not disappointed.
At first I was a bit wary of how basic the book starts off, but Lasser starts small and works his way up to some incredibly useful explanations of the seemingly endless amount *nix utilities. More importantly, the book lives up to its name, it teaches the reader to use utilities such as sed, awk & vi in a powerful way by incorperating pipes and I/O redirects.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become a more effective *nix user, although it's important this person has a prior basic understanding.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent! But be careful of your expectations.
Review: Cutting to the chase; an excellent book! I strongly recommend it if you are clear about what it is intended to accomplish. (The author even goes so far as to state his intent in the Introduction.)This book gives an overall understanding of the underpinnings of the Unix (and therefore the Linux) operating systems. It provides a broad-brush overview of how and why 'nix works the way it does, from file structures to manual formats. It does not provide detailed instruction in setting up or operating a system, in administering security programs or protocols, or even in programming. But if you learn like I do (actually, like most people do...) your learning cycle is greatly shortened if you first get a broad-brush overview. It provides a foundation for all the details that come later. If your intent is to learn *nix, my suggestion would be to buy or download a distribution (heck, some 'detail' books even come with one). Then go through the pain and suffering of installing it. (Hint: this is the reason to buy a book or distribution; the manual is very useful!) Then, buy this book to understand what your new system is doing - and why. Once you have, you'll be able to use the detail books, the 'bibles,' far more effectively. You'll even be able to use the documentation that comes with the system - or is readily available on the web - the way it is intended to be used. It was been noted in a previous review that there are a number of technical inaccuracies and typos in the book. I suspect this is the price to be paid for the rapid release of technical books we see these days. I, for one, would rather put up with some errors that an on-line errata clears up than have to wait until a book is perfect, but completely out of date and useless. If you think about it, having the problems corrected quickly via on-line 'patch' is the business model of the modern world! Again, a strong recommendation for this one. It's a very useful document to have, know, and refer to!
Rating:
Summary: Unix from the inside looking out
Review: Funny, unorthodox, well organized, this book is a great survey of the unix family of OSes, useful both for newcomers to the system with basic computing familiarity & for those who (like me) have used & learned unix haphazardly for years. The first chapter, rather than teaching you frequently-used commands & their options, describes how to find & decipher documentation! The heart (or possibly the lymphatic system) of unix is figuring stuff out for yourself --not an easy matter if you don't know how to find out what you want to know or interpret what you've found. If you've ever stared at a man page, wondering what was wrong with your brain that you couldn't understand a word of something so detailed & apparently written in English, this book is for you! Subsequent chapters describe files (everything in unix is a file), processes, redirection & pipes, networking, regular expressions, shells, etc. --a holistic overview of unix as a complete system.
Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: I bought this book a while ago, but only recently got around to reading it. That's the amazing part about this book... the fact that it's readable! Most Linux/Unix books I've seen are the most boring reading material there is. Not so with this one. Jon really knows how to keep it entertaining, while still providing an excellent introduction to [ li | u ]nix. I found myself wanting to try the examples for sheer interest and challenge. He also goes into using pipes, and teaches you how to use them effectively. Yes, this is a great introduction, that's all it was meant to be, and it fills it's purpose superbly!
Rating:
Summary: Where is the beef?
Review: I don't understand why this book's rating is so high. On the back of the book it says the user level is intermediate-advanced. I think this book is for new users who have never used UNIX only. Also I feel the title is misleading. The design model is not explained well throughout the book and the author does not teach you how to think UNIX.
Rating: 
Summary: A Different Kind of Unix Book
Review: I had to write this book: I tried not to, but there was no getting around it. Unfortunately, most introductions to Unix stink: they spend lots of time trying to get you to learn all sorts of meaningless details about how to run a particular command. What they never did was give you a framework so that you could learn Unix on your own. That is, most Unix tutorials are like phrasebooks: they contain a number of predigested commands that you are obligated to memorize and repeat without any deep understanding of why. Think Unix tries to be more like a language textbook: sure, you learn some vocabulary (ie, individual commands), but what's important is that you learn how to put it all together to do new things, to think thoughts that the writers of a phrasebook could never imagine. The first thing the book does is teach you how to teach yourself: the entire first chapter is dedicated to learning how to read and where to find the right documentation. Most computer people think that everyone is born knowing how to interpret documentation, but it's not the case: it is a learned skill, and it can be taught. If it's not obvious, I'm very excited by this approach. If it excites you too, then this is probably the Unix book for you. It assumes that you've used a computer before and that you're fairly comfortable learning new applications, sometimes without documentation. If you're the sort of person who clicks through the menus in your word processor to find the feature that you want, if you sometimes click on something just to find out what it does, this is the book for you. It assumes no prior Unix experience and is in general very approachable. There's stuff in here for Unix experts too, but it's not a book about system administration. It's a book for new users who want to understand what's going on, why things work the way they do, and how to get the most out of the system: it's for readers who want to learn to Think Unix.
Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: I received Think Unix as a present, and it is absolutely great! there are clear examples of how to perform shell commands and more with optional exercises to test your knowledge of what you have read. Some of the most outstanding information in this book for me was on permissions, piping, shell scripts, & counting loops. I highly recommend this book for people getting started in Unix/Linux.
Rating:
Summary: Think Unix is great
Review: I received Think Unix as a present, and it is absolutely great! there are clear examples of how to perform shell commands and more with optional exercises to test your knowledge of what you have read. Some of the most outstanding information in this book for me was on permissions, piping, shell scripts, & counting loops. I highly recommend this book for people getting started in Unix/Linux.
| 
