Teach Yourself Unix

Put your UNIX fears to rest and embark on the programming path with teach yourself UNIX®, 3rd Edition. Starting with UNIX session basics and the UNIX directory, veteran authors Kevin Reichard and Eric F. Johnson provide you with the foundation for a successful programming career.

teach yourself UNIX, 3rd Edition also covers, permissions, logins, passwords, UNIX Internet tools, and the command line. Plus, teach yourself UNIX, 3rd Edition explains advanced UNIX capabilities such as multitasking, Awk programs, Perl scripts, and the streams editor. Reichard and Johnson include a detailed glossary and an appendix of basic UNIX commands.

Teach Yourself Unix, Third Edition, does a fair job of explaining commands to newer users, but truly distinguishes itself with its attention to C and Perl programming. The book also contains a good command reference and glossary but loses some credibility with the appearance of several errors.

Teach Yourself Unix, Third Edition, would serve the reader better if it used different section-titling conventions. For example, "Using the -R Option with Ls" tells the reader nothing; something like "Listing Files in Subdirectories," which is what the -R switch is used for, would be better.

This book also suffers from some production problems. The sections about cc, the C compiler, consistently call the program Cc in their headings. The command ls gets called Ls in headings. Though this clearly is the work of a publishing package that puts headings into title case, Unix is case-sensitive and typing Cc in place of cc or Ls in place of ls will usually cause an error.