Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours 3rd Ed. Dave Taylor
After 25 pages, this book gets right into 'Getting onto the System and Using the Command Line.' The first part of the book is intelligently written and presented me with the history of Unix, why it exists and why there are so many different versions. I learned that Unix began as a fun project by a couple of programmers and evolved into several variations through the efforts of hundreds of other programmers who wanted to have fun, too--eventually becoming a sleek operating system, written in "C" for portability and speed.
The focus is on the most important, popular and valuable command-line commands, flags, switches, options and variables. Step-by-step task oriented exercises and a Workshop section at the end of each lesson support the learning process. Throughout the book are Tips, Notes and Cautions.
I first learned about absolute and relative paths-the simplest concept of the hierarchy of Unix files in 1994, when putting my first web site together. Someone told me about the root, 'showed me' the …/ and I didn't grasp it right away. More than once I 'killed' some threads in a usenet group I was reading, and didn't understand what happened! Those were tortuous days. This book clearly explains Unix commands, hierarchical file system and explains what all the directories are for. After all this time I understand that the cig-bin directory is for executable binaries and how they get that way!
The author of this book introduces and explains complex concepts by using parallels from real life and by injecting a little humor. You will learn introductory and advanced commands and techniques for using Unix text editors vi and emacs. You will learn about the Korn shell, C shell, Bourne shell and even Bash. If you want to, you can learn about the awk programming language, inline editing and pipeline tools in Hour 16. Keep going and you will learn how to print, make backups, read electronic mail, telnet and ftp your files. There's also a little bit about Apache servers, cgi scripts and server side includes. Although I sincerely wish I had Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours in 1994 when I was struggling with telnet, Pine and Pico, the operating system makes more sense to me now.
Level: Beginner Highly recommended.-editor, Digital Times