file systems

This is a rare kind of book. It is not well suited for front to cover reading. But you will be reading it all the time.

Unix system contains hundreds of tools, commands that can perform an amazing amount of tasks. Each one of them can be tailored by using parameters to perform his concrete function in a different way each time, the one that best fits your needs.

Of course, nobody master them all, or all their parameters. Unix users read man pages when they need to search a forgotten parameter, or an unknown tool. After months and years of work, each Unix user has a personal way of using the tools provided. Not always the best.

That is the place of this book. Several knowledgeable writers offer their years of experience condensed in a few "tricks" for a specific task you may want to do. For example, finding a file. You have a brief description of some of the most useful parameters you can use (not all, man pages are for that). Then the book displays some examples on using them: finding files older than X days, finding big files...

This is an excellent book for experts and beginners alike. The first time Unix user will have a help for finding "how to do that" in Unix. The expert will find new and innivative ways to use the commands he thought he mastered.

As many reviewers have said already, this book will not teach you how to set a machine or configure a server, but it will help to improve your performance and your overall knowledge of the tools you use, and the tools you should be using.

UNIX POWER TOOLS is really the best book on UNIX/LINUX. It's original, enjoyable, perfectly written (concise & sarcastic), intuitively and clearly organized, fastly accessible, critical about technologies, loaded with expertise and experience.

As a student then a computer scientist, I searched and read many and many books. This one truly stands up as the best designed, organized and written, not only for Unix/Linux but in all categories.

It has a unique, very original and practical layout: It's a book-magazine-almanac, meaning the reader doesn't have to read lond pages to get information (which requires attention & uses energy) nor follow the chapters. The access to information is the faster possible. It's so true a pleasure that I often read it again, only to be delighted. (The style is ironical and concise.)

On a technical standpoint, the organization is clear, with big "natural" topics, well structured, with a progressive approach. The useful knowledge is given immediately, and it's very easy to find an answer to any problem. Besides, it's an excellent tutorial/reference guide to the shell programming, sed, awk, and many others. Even the "theorical" aspects have a very pratical impact. For example, the part linked to the File System & the links explains clearly the concepts, but this helped to, for the first time, really understand the differences and therefore use the most appropriate solution.

It's important to know that the book is limited in scope (which is clearly indicated); however, at the difference of others that pretend to cover anything but only stay at the surface, this one really goes deep inside. In addition, even the elements that are not covered have a starting point, allowing the reader to find easily additional data.

However, some points are not here, like new interesting features of Bash 2.0, & others. Let's hope the 3rd version will add many more and extend the book's scope.

To conclude, if you have one & only one book to choose, UNIX POWER TOOLS is for you.

Let's get a couple things straight: one, I buy a lot of books; two, I read about 15% of each one. This book is one of the few exceptions. It already had 56 reviews when I wrote this, but after picking it up for the 84th time, I felt compelled to add my five stars. Buy with confidence.