LincolnBlogs

   As a full time Senior Linux System Administrator in real life I was quite interested to get my fingers on this book for a review. After all, the job of a smart sysadmin pretty much dictates scripting away as much of your work as possible. We are a lazy bunch and we call that being efficient 🙂

   This is the first book I have reviewed by Packt Publishing or the author, Sarath Lackshman, I wasn’t really sure what I was in for. In fact I was slightly put off by the price, which I initially thought overly hefty at $45 US. For that kind of scratch I am used to seeing a much more substantial sized book from the sort of publishers I normally review for. I started making my way through the book anyway, and I am glad I did.

   What makes this book really cool is the premise behind it. Inside, as a “cookbook” should, you have these “recipes” for scripts. These are not what I have normally seen in many scripting books before, which are generally theoretical and sometimes lengthy examples, but these recipes are pretty straight forward, real world examples of things you might want to do, and how to handle those efficiently. The recipes are also small enough that you could easily piece meal things out to compose another script and I am certain that would be a great help to novice scripters.

   As nice as I think this book would be for novice scripters, there is a lot of smart stuff in there, stuff that had never occurred to me through my years of command line use. I actually got really excited to try some of the examples in there and to put them into practice. I particularly liked the little tricks here and there, like the “subshell trick” and I was absolutely thrilled that this book used modern syntax and variable manipulation, dropping the deprecated stuff like putting commands into back ticks. Good form!

   This book is certainly a keeper and I would recommend it highly to anyone who wants to become proficient on the command line. Some days you actually *do* get what you pay for, and I believe people will find this book to be a good example of that. This book was truly fun for me to work my way through and I sure hope they have more like it in store for the future. Go buy yourself a copy. I know I will be hanging on to this one for a while 🙂