The UNIX CD Bookshelf

Review by Tim Ferrer

I was wondering if I bit off more than I could chew when I ordered The UNIX CD Bookshelf to review. The reason being, is that this, as the title implies, is a collection of actually 7 books that have proven indispensable to beginning, intermediate and advanced UNIX Users. I consider myself among the latter and intend to keep the accompanying CD as a reference in my briefcase at all times when I am not using it. Also, since I am not UNIX novice with either Unix, Korn Shell or vi, I will not attempt to discern whether the corresponding Learning * books are good at teaching a novice but, rather if the books appear to complete in the subject matter or, if it does happen to teach me something new, I may remark on that. As mentioned above, the CD that accompanies The UNIX CD Bookshelf is made up of 7 of the following books:

1. Unix in a Nutshell (3rd Edition)
2. Unix Power Tools (3rd Edition)
3. Learning the Korn Shell (2nd Edition)
4. Sed & Awk (2nd Edition)
5. Learning the vi editor (6th Edition)
6. Mac OS X for UNIX Geeks
7. Learning the Unix Operating System (5th Edition)

Since this is an HTML CD Bookshelf, one key thing that must be checked for is the claimed compatibility of the CD. The cover indicates that the CD works with most browsers, including lynx, which support HTML 4.0. Since I have RH 9 along with Windows 98SE and several browsers I was able to confirm this. Here are my results of accessing the CD from the browsers I have tried accessing the CD from.

For basic browsing The UNIX CD Bookshelf the CD does work as claimed with every browser that I have. The cover does qualify the support of the Java based search engine that comes on the CD in saying that it will work with most Java-enabled browsers supporting Java 1.1.2 or later. Consequently, of course, neither lynx nor links are Java enabled so the search engine will not work on those browsers as well though browsing the books will.

On the Search Engine page there is the following message: This search engine has trouble with the Mozilla browser, mostly on Linux and Mac OS. For more information on how to use this search engine, including a complete matrix of browser/platform compatibility, please read this. The phrase Â"complete matrixÂ" is actually a link, so I clicked on it. Well, since I was on Linux at the time I got a message saying that there is no application associated with this file. It turned out that the file was an MS-Excel file. So are the editors of The UNIX CD Bookshelf expecting the buyers of a book dedicated to UNIX to have MS-Excel on their machine? Well, fortunately, I just happened to have Open Office installed on this machine so I was able to open that document without any problem. It lists the OS and browser versions the Search engine was tested on and the results of the test. It was tested on Mac OS 9 and OS X, Windows 98SE, Me, 2000 and XP, and Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 8.0. The browsers it was tested with were various recent versions of Netscape, IE and Opera.

In going through the online books, I do believe I would prefer a default Next button on each page. That way I would not have to keep my hand on the mouse to go to the following page. If I could just press <ENTER> to go forward, I believe that would make going through the online books a bit easier. In going through the online books, I got myself into the habit of pressing <TAB> four times and then <ENTER>.

With the CD, The UNIX CD Bookshelf comes with a hardcopy of the 3rd Edition of Arnold Robbins' Unix in a Nutshell. This edition was printed in August 1999, which is approaching 5 years as of this review. This prompted me to consider whether what was in the book may be missing commands or features that are common to today's Unix platforms that were not then. One thing that stood out to me in that light in the reference was an elaboration of rcp and rsh with only a mention of ssh2. Also there is no mention of scp. I suspect, that after 5 years, the time may be approaching for an updated 5th Edition. Unix in a Nutshell begins by summarizing UNIX history in the span of one paragraph. It does that by focusing on one subject of that history: The common origin and then dispersion of different UNIX flavors and then the current movement to unite the different UNIX platforms under one interoperable common standard. This, apparently, prepares the reader for the scope of the UNIX that will be covered in this reference. Namely, that is SVR4 and Solaris 7. Unix in a Nutshell is broken into five major parts, the first of which is a reference to the UNIX commands and shells that come with UNIX, grouped according to the problem domain the commands are used for. The chapter on pattern matching is short and, though a whole book can be written on regular expressions, as a quick reference to those who are already familiar with pattern matching, this chapter is concise and well laid out. Included in it is a regexp support matrix for a few of the basic UNIX tools which lays out which regex constructs are understood by them. The following chapters then describe the emacs, vi and ex editors. The vi chapter acknowledges other vi clones but leaves it to Learning the vi editor to elaborate on their features and idiosyncrasies. The chapters after that are separately dedicated to the sed and awk stream editors and include, for awk, the internal variables that are accessible to the user. Chapters for the text formatting tools such as nroff, troff, ms, me and man then follow. I've never had to become proficient with them but the reference does appear to be thorough enough to be of use to someone who needs it. Finally the source code management tools SCCS, RCS and make are then given their own chapters. These do have brief primers at the beginning of the chapters and then go into the reference.

Like Unix in a Nutshell, Unix Power Tools admits the difficulty in completely describing all features of all version of the tools on different *NIX systems and states that it does not attempt to completely do so. As the third edition, Unix Power Tools was published in October 2002 and was updated to reflect that. It covers not just the commercial versions that have been around since the early 1990's but the more recent open source distributions as well, such as Linux and FreeBSD. Also, though the Internet began in the UNIX world Unix Power Tools was also updated to include topics that are relevant to recent Internet issues such as security and new protocols. The first chapter is mostly conceptual, emphasizing to the reader the design of UNIX, describing it as an OS with shells that connect smaller specialized programs, which, though they are useful in themselves, can be connected together to accomplish tasks that are beyond the scope or expectation of the original designers. The rest of the chapters are a well organized and indispensable reference and partial tutorial to anyone needing to grasp or look up the features available in most UNIX system. Though there is a lot here that is definitely old hat to seasoned UNIX professionals, it would behoove them to look through this updated version to be reminded of what tricks that might've been forgotten or to see what commands are now available that may have been overlooked out of habitually performing a job some other way.

Mac OS X for UNIX Geeks in short is the Unix in a Nutshell and Unix Power Tools book for OS X, describing the basic UNIX commands and features as well as the additional features, designs and idiosyncrasies that will very likely make an OS X bigot out of beginning UNIX users whose first main exposure to UNIX is with Mac OS X.

Learning the Korn Shell, like the title implies, will help a beginning UNIX user become proficient with the Korn shell and, with Appendix A, will let the user know that there are other shell environments that are worth exploring. Appendix B is useful for both beginning and experienced Korn shell programmers as a reference to ksh.

I had acquired the first edition of Sed & Awk at around 1992 as these venerable utilities were more in vogue back then. Nonetheless, though they are no longer used to build entire subsystems, as they sometimes were, they are still useful tools to have in a UNIX environment. The preface makes references to obtaining source code to the examples and samples used in this book and acquiring it via ftp. (I would like to suggest, that, with the CD version of this book, it would be nice to have the source code on the same CD as the book instead of needing to download it.)

This second edition of Sed & Awk has pretty much kept the same format and structure as the original version and mainly added updates for the changes that have occurred with sed and awk; namely, the additional versions of these utilities in both open and closed source form and their addition to the POSIX standard.

I don't have any previous edition of Learning the Unix Operating System, so I can't really comment on how it might've changed. This latest edition, however, does brief the beginning UNIX user on the use of windows and networking. I do not think experienced UNIX users will get much out of this book as it goes through a lot of the basics, but it could prove indispensable for a beginner.

Since I know vi, I don't know how well I can judge a book on learning it. One thing I look for is to see if it can even teach me something new that I didn't already know. I have told people, and this is still true, that with every job I've been at I learned something new about vi that I didn't know before. Well, I can also say that, with this book, I also learned new stuff. It is a helpful tutorial for beginning programmers as well as a useful reference once proficiency with the editor is established. Chapters 8-12 also describe the vi clones that are out there, such as elvis and vim and the additional features that they provide. (My first deviation from vi to a clone was elvis and, 2 years ago, I switched again to vim. Consequently, Mr. Moolenaar, has spoiled me to the point that I resist going back to using the original vi if I can help it.)

Overall, these books on CD will provide a useful and easily accessible reference to my use of UNIX both at work and home.