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Despite the fact that I am actually quoted in this book in the “Praise foe other books by Mark G. Sobell” section, it really is a good book! Scratch that, it is a book that I am going to make *sure* makes the rounds through my office.

Here’s the trick. There are a million books and websites and such that have some general instruction on generalized shell scripting or particular commands or even topical stuffs. By and large, they are incomplete and usually feature a bunch of theoretical examples like “suppose you want to draw a box with three nested boxes inside…” Those kinds of things really aren’t much help to the average guy and that is where this book differs.

This book is chocked full of great command explanations, practical topics and real life examples. Sobell has gone out of his way to present this information not only in an interesting fashion, but a usable one as well, not to mention being very Linux distribution agnostic in the process. For example, he covers both the apt-get and yum utilities. There are even some OS X notes as well.

This is a vast and enormous subject to cover and Sobell does his usual excellent job with it. He starts you out with a little background, moves you into using editors and commands and different shells and even into some interpreted languages, all while guiding you through enough pertinent information to not only perk you interest a little on the subject, but give you a functional, working understanding as well. Great job and this is certainly another book I will be holding on to – at least until the next edition comes out 🙂