unix

This is a great book for someone new to ksh programmer. It should be treated as a work manual and not as a reference book. Read this book through from cover to cover and you'll soon be writing ksh scripts with ease.

The book takes you though Korn shell basics from answer what a shell is to using files, I/O, and character quoting.

From there it goes into command line editing, customizing your environment, and into basic programming. Once through that you learn flow control, arrays, advanced I/O, and process handling.

Finally you learn how to debug the script you just wrote.

As a reference manual this book is average. It's not meant to be a typical "nutshell" book and shouldn't be treated as one.

The bottom line? Buy this book if you are truly interested in learning how to program in the Korn shell.

I have owned this book since 1996 and I used it as my introduction to Korn shell programming. To the credit of the book, I was able to become very adept at Korn shell and I have written some amazing scripts. However, I must admit that some sections of this book are misleading, confusing and downright incomprehensible. It took many re-readings of some chapters before the author's lesson was brought to light. I would recommend this book as a Korn shell reference, but it is probably not the best place to start for a Korn shell beginner. I am finding this to be true for a lot of the books by O'Reilly & Associates.

I found the book not usefull at all. Simple things on how to write a loop is so full of text without addressing the simple issue of how to write a simple while loop with a counter. I found the examples sparse and irrelevant to what i was doing.