Unix Made Easy

For example, this book devotes a full chapter (one of significant size) to the subject of file permissions. Rather than just spew forth a series of "do this for this, do that for that" steps, the author takes time to explain what happens when you issue a chmod command with a series of parameters. Nicely rendered conceptual diagrams help a lot with this potentially confusing subject. Scores of examples, with instructions explicitly stated, also help the cause. Chapters conclude with exercises you can try in order to prove you know what you're doing. Author John Muster focuses on the Bourne, Korn, and C shells. More coverage of bash, the most popular Linux shell, would make this book better. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to get around in Linux and Unix, mainly at the command line interface. Sections deal with file management, the vi editor, shell scripting, working with users and processes, and doing editing work with sed, and to a lesser extent, awk.