Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours

This is yet another one of those books that I bought over a decade ago, but never finished reading it in it’s entirety. Instead, I originally simply read portions of it. Well, now I went back and re-read this book completely, and definitely learned new things! This book only covers the plain bourne (sh) shell and no other (thank goodness).

Published in 1999, about 90% percent of the content covered in this book still applies to Bash shell programming in 2018. I did, however encountered some interesting compatibility problems with GNU’s Bourne Again bash shell, with some of the examples described in this book. As this book was not directly written with that shell in mind.

In order to be fully proficient in shell programming, you need to be well acquainted with the tons of the built-in tools that are part of the shell as well as other important utilities that are part of a Unix/Linux operating system. This book starts you off with the absolute shell basics like working with files and directories, to then actual programming concepts like shell variables, functions, parameters, etc. To finally advance topics like regular expressions, input/output, signal handling, debugging techniques, and portable shell programming. This book also covers briefly covers, but albeit really good, both sed and awk.

Most if not all of the examples described in this book were really easy to follow, however this book never really felt like a beginners book. I really liked how it progressed, it eventually became more of an advance book by the chapter.

Rating: 4/5

Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours

• Chapter 1: Shell Basics
• Chapter 2: Script Basics
• Chapter 3: Working with Files
• Chapter 4: Working with Directories
• Chapter 6: Manipulating File Attributes
• Chapter 7: Variables
• Chapter 8: Substitution
• Chapter 9: Quoting
• Chapter 10: Flow Control
• Chapter 11: Loops
• Chapter 12: Parameters
• Chapter 13: Input/Output
• Chapter 14: Functions
• Chapter 15: Text Filters
• Chapter 16: Filtering Text using Regular Expressions
• Chapter 17: Filtering text with awk
• Chapter 18: Miscellaneous Tools
• Chapter 19: Dealing with Signals
• Chapter 20: Debugging
• Chapter 21: Problem Solving with Functions
• Chapter 22: Problem Solving with Scripts
• Chapter 23: Scripting for Portability
• Chapter 24: Shell Programming FAQs

Tags: [ bash ]

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