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Think Unix 51
ThinkUnix | |
author | Jon Lasser |
pages | 294 |
publisher | Que 2000 |
rating | 8 |
reviewer | Danny Yee |
ISBN | 0-7897-2376-x |
summary | Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. |
In a world full of volumes like Linux: The Complete Reference, Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 Unleashed, Corel Linux for Dummies and so forth, Lasser's Think Unix is a breath of fresh air. Rather than trying to be a detailed guide to a particular system, a comprehensive reference work, or a source of answers to particular problems, Lasser tries to teach the fundamental concepts of Unix and the Unix way of thinking. He also captures something of the way in which Unix is a way of life and a culture, not just an operating system, with a good leavening of humour, history, and hackish lore. One consequence of this approach is that Think Unix will date far less quickly than most operating system books. I recommend it to computer science students, techies coming from non-Unix backgrounds, or anyone more interested in understanding the underlying ideas of Unix than solving particular problems.
Lasser starts with a chapter on documentation, explaining how to use "man" to read manual entries and touching on other forms of documentation. He then introduces the building blocks of Unix - files and processes and redirection and pipes. A brief look at TCP/IP networking, showing how to interact directly with some common network services using telnet, is followed by an introduction to vi and sed and basic regular expressions. Four chapters then deal with shell scripting in more detail, touching on differences between shells, variables and quoting, control structures, and aliases, functions, and scripts. A quick look at X explains its general design, something of the variety of window managers and desktops available, and basic configuration of startup, resources, and fonts.
Obviously a lot is left out of this (there is nothing about system administration, for example), but it provides solid foundations for further learning. And a number of topics sneak in "in passing": a mention of ssh (and associated legal issues) and a little bit about termcap and terminfo, among other things. Some practice problems are included, simple exercises to test understanding and help learning; answers to these are provided in the appendices, along with a short glossary (which includes pointers to other resources).
Think Unix has an unfortunate number of typos, including a few in code examples. And there are a few things I might have done differently (I'd have ditched most of the grainy greyscale half-page screenshots of different window managers and desktop environments, for example). Overall, however, it's a great book and the biggest problem it poses me is working out which of my "clueful but not Unix-literate" friends to pass my review copy on to.
Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
A book review by Danny Yee <editor@dannyreviews.com>
Reviews of more than five hundred other books:
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Two schools of thought (Score:3)
The other approach is the Unix one, which says that it's the user's responsibility to learn the system, warts and all. This is exactly the mentality that created the "Unix wizard" syndrome in the first place (people have to work hard to learn how to use the system effectively, and then they don't want it simplified for others, which would only devalue their accomplishment), and sadly, there seems to be little going on in the Linux world to counteract that.
In the short run, books like the one reviewed here are probably a good thing, but I would love to see more serious work being done to make them less needed.
Re:Two schools of thought (Score:1)
If there is so little going on in the Linux world to counteract the Unix wizard mentality, what do you call KDE and GNOME? Both projects are about making the Unix desktop easier to use, and while neither have fully succeeded on that goal yet, both projects are going strong and are high-profile in the Linux world, hardly what I'd call "little going on".
Unix is *very* user friendly (Score:3)
- Tony "Yes, it's paraphrased" Taylor
The llama book (Score:1)
As far as I know, it is one of only a handful of O'Reilly books more commonly referred to by their colophonic companion animal than by their official title. The others being the Camel book (Programming Perl) and the bat book (Sendmail). There may be a couple of others, but those three are the only ones I know of that fit that description
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:1)
Anyway, I can also see the other side of the point though. Once you know one *nix you really are able to adjust quickly. Honestly, I kind of like working from my Sparc Ultra 5. Solaris is damn stable and helixcode runs really smooth on it. The terminology is a little different and really the only thing else that would freak newbie out about my Sparc is the placement of directories. The different *nixes are not that different. People seem to be very frightened about moving between them. I think that is rather odd.
Stupid! (Score:2)
That command will, on a Linux system, only erase every file/directory in the root beginning wiuth a character ASCIIbeticaly prior to 'p'. After doing so, it will get stuck into an endless loop in
Next time you try to educate users, please write commands that at least _terminates_, that is, either returns or core-dumps.
Re:Typos not a minor point (Score:1)
These are all fixed. Thank you for reporting the problems.
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:2)
Well, I'm a professional Unix sysadmin (And the author of the book. :-)). We're a Solaris/IRIX/Linux shop. Linux is the same. Or at least as much as either Solaris or Irix is.
We've moved many of our central AFS servers to Linux from Irix because Linux is much more stable. (Solaris does well too as an AFS fileserver, but why pay more when you don't get more?)
We've moved most of our labs from Irix boxes to Linux boxes. We're down to two labs with Irix boxes, which will probably be replaced in the next year or so with Linux boxes and decent 3D cards.
About one-third to one-quarter of our central servers (for around 20,000 active accounts) are Linux boxes.
Linux is Unix.
Re:So it covers X Windows? (Score:2)
The book has eleven chapter. The last two chapters are about X. X is a major Unix subsystem that most people have significant problems with, so it needed to be covered.
Put another way, the book is has 242 pages of main text. Pages 1 through 196 don't have a damned thing to do with X; pages 197-242 are about X. Nothing before page 197 cares whether or not you have X, so not having X shouldn't stop anyone from getting through the majority of the book..
Re:Typos not a minor point (Score:3)
Hey, I'm the author of the book. This is a fair criticism, but...:
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
I could never get StarCraft to function under WINE. I couldn't even get it to load, even if I pointed it at my existing windows directory. I could never get the fake registry to work. WINE really needs to be able to create all the things it needs to work on it's own, if it doesn't find them. That, or we need a good configuration tool that will do this.... Hmm.... Think I've found my next project...
Fawking Trolls! [slashdot.org]
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
Fawking Trolls! [slashdot.org]
This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie needs. (Score:2)
Fawking Trolls! [slashdot.org]
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:2)
From the intuitive standpoint, I don't think X is anywhere near up to being as good as it's competition, HOWEVER I think it's strength lies in it's flexability. I was showing the PFS guy at work all the different GUI's that come with Mandrake 7.1 and he was astonished. Too bad it slows the system down so bad. But again, perhaps this is my fault - if it wasn't so hard to learn how to configure things, maybe I could get X to run better. I dunno. I'm going to buy this book (I'm such a sucker for books) and see if it teaches me anything I don't already know.
Fawking Trolls! [slashdot.org]
Re:Two schools of thought (Score:3)
Fawking Trolls! [slashdot.org]
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:4)
Fawking Trolls! [slashdot.org]
Re:Two schools of thought (Score:2)
BTW, don't you love English? `Will have been removed' is such a nice long verb...
Nice idea from my point of view (Score:1)
This book could be helpful to them, I think. I'll propose that it will be bought next time
The UNIX philosophy (Score:3)
The unix philosophy [amazon.com]
is better, from the "Think UNIX" title perspective
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:1)
I agree, this book sounds good to me. I'd like to see the underlying similarities in the *nixes.
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:1)
Bully for you for all your *nix experience, may it stand you in good stead. Meanwhile, I don't have that background. I need to know how the different *nices are similiar.
And...my mind is made up, I don't know how they're similar.
Yeah, I can copy files, list directories, edit files, etc. In that way, yes, they're similar, but until you mentioned "slice instead of partition..." I had no idea what "slice" was referring to.
I think you've illustrated the point that other people have made. That gurus have gotten to the point of obtuseness in their knowledge.
I'm as guilty of it as anyone though. I can't understand why the user can't figure out how to copy a file to a floppy disk, and I treat them as if they're an idiot, when the truth is, I'm an idiot for assuming everyone else in the world "should" know as much about "insert knowledge specialty here" as I do.
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
By the way, I see your bitchslap has ended... visible posting again, must be fun.
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Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
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Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
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Hasn't anyone heard of... (Score:3)
Re:Get it at thinkgeek!!! (Score:1)
Schmuck.
-grendel drago
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:1)
(You can shuffle any of the others into the 'Solaris' position there with much the same effect.)
That's exactly *why* a book that tries to teach the *concepts* behind Unix is a great idea, rather than learning the right magic for just the box you happen to be using now.
Regards,
Tim.
Re:Another book for Unix programmers (Score:1)
This is why I always recommend the Frisch [oreilly.com] book from O'Reilly over the Nemeth Sysadmin book. It actually starts with files & processes and works its way up. I find that it gives a MUCH better grounding in WHY you do something a particular way as opposed to just explaining HOW you do it.
IMHO,
Michael
Another book for Unix programmers (Score:2)
Re:Two schools of thought (Score:1)
You can see it at work in OS X and Eazel.
Sounds like my first book (Score:2)
Underlying Concepts (Score:3)
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
Re:Typos not a minor point (Score:1)
p.31 - I assume that should be "Socrates", not "Soctrates"
p.46 - "user", not "uger"
p.123 - "last", not "lasgt"
p.128 - "digits", not "difits"
BTW, p.154 - æ is æ :)
It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:4)
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
As far as being less intuitive, I don't think any GUI lives up to the 'intuitive' hype. I remember when the Apple Lisa came out and I watched all kinds of people move the mouse and click on icons and get frustrated when nothing happened. Not intuitive. We only think GUI's are intuitive because we've used them for such a long time.
Unix as an education (Score:1)
This is part of the reason why it is important the OS doesn't get out of the hands of the people.
Re:Typos not a minor point (Score:1)
Danny's review left me with the impression that there were more than two code errors. I suppose that's a low enough rate to make me actually want to see the book, but I'm still bothered. Here are some general comments which may not apply to your book:
Errata, revised printings, etc., can mitigate some errors, but there are absolutely things you must get right the first time. One early publisher had to recall an entire printing of the Bible because of one typo (a "shalt" instead of "shalt not"). Funny to us, but less humorous in an era when Religious Incorrectness was a capital offense. Or consider a similar error in a medical textbook...
If your book is getting "messed up" by your editors, then your publisher has some basic problems. Why on earth do you need to do a lot of format conversions? If a publisher is serious about producing technical books in a computer era, they should be standardizing on one or two well-structured formats.
You can argue that this kind of problem is not the author's fault. Perhaps, but I'm not particularly interested in assigning blame. I just want to know what authors and publishers produce work I can use.
You mention "the Llama book". I assume this is something from O'Reilly -- I haven't memorized all their cute colophons. This is one publisher I have strongly mixed feelings about. On the one hand, they have some first-rate authors, are the only publishers of authoritative works on many topics, and have some carefully thought-out procedures [oreilly.com] for writing, editing, and production. On the other hand, they manage to produce a lot of badly edited books -- and even a fair number of paper doorstops. Not a gold standard, I'm afraid.
Re:The llama book (Score:1)
Typos not a minor point (Score:2)
It bothers me when the reviewer gives a book a positive rating, but then goes on to say, "but there are a lot of typos, and some of the code examples don't work." Imagine that you're a Unix/Linux newbie, and you copy a shell command from a book, and get some obscure syntax error. Unless you have the shell background to figure out what's wrong (and of course you don't, you're a newbiew) you're stuck. You'll probably put the book down and never pick it up again.
Good technical communication is written by the anal-retentive. Sad, but true.
Re:So it covers X Windows? (Score:1)
why not recommend the book?
You can still run X on BSD, right? You can still run X on Mac OSX too...
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:1)
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:1)
you can run the same toolset under any unix.
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots" (Score:1)
Dude, I configured my first unix back before there was a Solaris, or a SUNOS. But, I have configured a few Solaris boxes. Can't teach an old doggo new tricks? Try this: next time you need to configure a Solaris box, make life easy on yourself and go to rpm.org [rpm.org] first. pull it down and install the gnu tools via RPM. It's a breeze.
I agree, this book sounds good to me. I'd like to see the underlying similarities in the *nixes.
I thought you just said they're not similar? make up your mind :)
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)
Re:Redundant (Score:1)
rm -rf /
And if you don't need a help system before typing that, you sure will afterwards. Oops, I forgot Linux hard-deletes files with no recovery.
You dont need books to learn UNIX (Score:1)
Now that's rather evil, ya know... (Score:1)
Re:This sounds like it's EXACTLY what a newbie nee (Score:1)