Every time I dip into this weighty tome, I seem to come up with something new. A case in point is pcal, which i discovered browsing one slow afternoon (when I should have been working on an article; but that's another story). Pcal is a program for generating Postscript calendars, with a rich command-language enabling the user to describe repeating events, one-offs, etc.
This is a browser's book, meant for dipping into; highly-structured, so that it bursts at the seams with cross references. Interesting "sidebars" take a closer look at syntax or point to other areas for exploration, including more technical details that might not be immediately apparent. It is also one big, heavy book, running to well over a thousand pages and 53 chapters. And yet, rather than the size being a hindrance, one wonders rather only how they managed to compress so much information into so small a compass. For there is no padding here. In a review of this length, I can't hope to do more than focus on a few areas that particularly impressed me.
The chapter on Regular Expressions is a superb introduction to this intricate field. It really tells you most everything you will likely need to know. The only place to go afterwards is Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions.
The two chapters on vi are a mini-book in themselves: 50 pages of everything but the basics. For that reason, they aren't complete in themselves; but complement them with this useful tutorial and you have all you need to know about vi, and then some.
In a way, the whole book is about the shell. But there are a couple of chapters dedicated to shell programming. These are very useful both for the beginner or the more advanced student.
The tail-end of the book has all the stuff they couldn't fit anyplace else! It's a rag-bag, but a useful one.
A CD-ROM is bundled with the book, containing all of the scripts and aliases described in the text, in addition to perl, GNU emacs, netpbm (graphics manipulation utilities), ispell, screen, the sc spreadsheet, and about 60 other PD and free software programs. In addition to the source code, binaries are provided for Sun4, Digital UNIX, IBM AIX, HP/UX, Red Hat Linux, Solaris, and SCO UNIX.
In a way, O'Reilly didn't do themselves any favours with "Unix Power Tools". I mean, you learn all you need to know about vi, sed and awk, to name but three, from this book — no need, therefore, to pick up copies of O'Reilly's tomes dedicated to just these tools— Learning the vi Editor and sed and awk respectively.
The book I know and love is the 1st edition. A 2nd edition came out in 1997. This brought some updated material: the blend of options and commands is slanted more toward the POSIX utilities, including the GNU versions; the bash and tcsh shells are given greater coverage (why they kept the C shell coverage at all is a mystery to me); and, Perl is given greater emphasis at the expense of awk (wrongly, in my opinion). One great lack in the 2nd edition is that it's printed in one colour, as opposed to the blue and black of the 1st edition. That looked really well, and it was a mistake to change it — I suppose the budget dictated otherwise, as it will. On balance, the 2nd edition is well worth buying new, but if you can get the 1st edition second-hand, that's just as good.
Another thing that's missing from this second edition is any mention of yours truly, despite that fact that I made two (count 'em!) contributions via bookquestions@ora.com. Hmm, perhaps they were crap. Oh, well. At leest I can rite reel gud.
If you buy only one book about Unix this year, or ever, make it this one.
Check my Amazon marketplace — I might have a copy of this book for sale.
Paul Dunne 2000
Copyright © 1995-2007
Paul Dunne,
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