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From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line [Paperback]

Oliver Kiddle (Author), Jerry Peek (Author), Peter Stephenson (Author)

2.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Book Description

Publication Date: 1 Dec 2004 | ISBN-10: 1590593766 | ISBN-13: 978-1590593769

This comprehensive, hands-on guide focuses on two of the most popular and feature-rich shells, bash and zsh. From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line is a book for all skill levels. Novices will receive an introduction to the features of shells and power users will get to explore the benefits of zsh—one of the most powerful, versatile shells ever written. Intermediate users will uncover hints, recipes, and ideas to enhance their skill sets.

The book covers shell programming, but is unique in its thorough coverage of using shells interactively—a powerful and time-saving alternative to Windows and a mouse. This strong author team has written an immediately useful book, packed with examples and suggestions that users of Unix, Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows can readily apply.

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Product details

Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: APRESS (1 Dec 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1590593766
ISBN-13: 978-1590593769
Product Dimensions: 18 x 2.2 x 23 cm

Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 910,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

About the Author

Oliver Kiddle is actively involved with the development of ZSH, and acts as a team authority in areas such as completion and parameters. Kiddle is a graduate of the University of York.

Jerry Peek is a freelance writer and instructor. He has used shells extensively and has taught users about them for over 20 years. Peek is the "Power Tools" columnist for Linux Magazine and coauthored the book UNIX Power Tools.

Peter Stephenson grew up in northeast England and studied physics at Oxford, where he earned a bachelor's degree and a Ph.D. Stephenson spent 9 years as a physics researcher, with an emphasis on computational physics, and resided in Liverpool, Swansea, Berlin, and Pisa.

Since 2000, Stephenson has been a software engineer with Cambridge Silicon Radio, where he works on the baseband firmware for short-range digital radio standards, such as Bluetooth. Stephenson has been involoved in the development of ZSH since the 1990s, when he began writing the FAQs. The past several years, he has coordinated the shell's development.

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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a reference book, but an indepth guide 4 Dec 2004

By "rcb102"

Format:Paperback

I picked this book up expecting it to be a reference manual, judging from the title, but was pleasantly surprised to find a well thought out discussion that made for easy reading. It was made even easier by a foreword on how to read and get the most out of the book - a welcome addition.

The book is divided into three clear sections. The first is an introduction to all things shell-like. Topics are kept shell agnostic so even if bash and zsh aren't available on your system it works well as a primer, in particular for Windows users. The book even takes time out to explain some of the shell principles that Windows and GUI users may not be too familiar with such as process creation and pipes. Windows users are also catered for with examples using Cygwin to run the shells but not at the expense of going off topic.

The second section goes through each of the primary shell features in turn such as command line completition, job control and shell history. Though this is primarily aimed at bash and zsh I found a lot of it applicable to other shells and the text frequently references other shells.

The third section gets down into the nitty gritty. You'll be suprised at just what you can do with bash and zsh and this is where the book really comes into its own. If you're struggling to get advanced features working then the explaination you need is probably in here. It is, however, technically challenging for a beginner, so don't expect to able to read the entire book in one sitting and be an expert - you'll have to work on the features in this section.

If you want to learn in detail about shells then this is a book worth considering.... Read more ›

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Good in places, but no focus at all 17 Jan 2012

By J. Davies

Format:Paperback

There are some "interesting" bits in this book, but there are also some "interesting" bits from a chap posting on the UNIX forums. It's as if this book is a load of forum posts pasted together. There's no focus. Who's the target audience? I couldn't say. Beginners can follow it. They won't take it in, as the structure of both paragraphs, content, and chapters is all over the place. I don't think this ever got proof-read. The spelling is fine, but the prose and technical writing ability is non-existent. I think the author just bashed out (pun there) some of his shell knowledge, with no particular goal in mind.

I would say the author wasn't really sure what he wanted to write about, never had an editor, wrote this very quickly, and threw everything he had together and called it a book. Even the diagrams to explain what I, personally, already understood were irrelevant -- not needed.

Even the title of this book is misleading and confusing. If you can get this for really cheap, pick it up as there may be some interesting bits in it, other than that it's not worth the paper it's printed on to be honest. The author knows what he's talking about, but I genuinely think he didn't know what he was supposed to write about or who for. Might be his personal notes on different shells -- of which he tries to cover a bit of everything, but never specifies what it is. "bash" and "zshell" in the title are irrelevant.

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Not for beginners. Dull tedious and badly organized. 21 Dec 2009

By Mr. Jeremy Flowers

Format:Paperback

I am a relative newcomer to UNIX. But have used several OS's over the 30 years in IT. Command line based OS/s include: Primos, IBM S/36, OS/2, OS/400, Dos. And then Windows and OS/X.
I bought this book as I am converting over to a Mac from years of using Windows based platforms on PCs. And OS/X / Darwin are UNIX based.
It has to be said UNIX is per formant compared to Windows based PC's for things like search operations and it has some nice features like numbering files file1, file2...., file10. No need to zero prefix files 1-9 with a zero get the directory to sort nicely. etc.

UNIX and the bash/zsh leave a lot to be desired when compared to OS/400. I'm dumbfounded at the cryptic and illogical and inconsistent naming conventions. Using minus symbols to signify add operation and sometimes upper and lower case argument flags reverse operations! I also hate the overwhelming permutations and complexities for special character handling and escaping/quoting and handling filenames with embedded spaces.

They really could learn a thing or two from OS/400's where commands are verb/noun based and everything is prompt able.
You can do things like GO CMD<verb> or GO CMD<noun> to immediately get to a list of commands.
Commands are prompt able with F4 and each argument to a command has a keyword, so you end up with commands like cmd arg1(...) arg2(...) The arg1() & arg2() keywords are optional. If you omit them then the values for the arguments have to be specified in the sequence they occur in the command. You can type a command name then hit F4 to go to a command builder. You can hit F1 to get to a command help overview. In an argument you can hit F4 again to get to a list of options.... If you hit F1 in an argument you get a context sensitive detailed explanation of the argument values. At any time in the command builder you can hit F14 to see the command string before it gets executed.

I've done a bit of research on Unix shells and Z shell interested me as it seems one with the most complete feature set of the Bourne based shells according to Wiki. And this book was recommended to me.

This book showcases bash and zsh, and shows how to do things like perform auto completion of commands you type into the command line.

It didn't work for me as a beginner I'm afraid. The back cover says it's suitable for such an audience...
I always hate books that make forward references. This one does this a lot and contains a lot of fragmented snippets.

There is a lack of continuity here as well, as you often don't know at a glance if you are looking at bash or zsh code. I'd much prefer to have seen either bash or zsh in margins each time a code snippet appeared. This was sometimes easy to see, as the prompts were either prefixed with bash$ or $. Or zsh% or %. But often you just dove into code with no visual cues. So at a glance you'd have to read the surrounding paragraphs which rendered the book unfriendly as a quick reference.

I would go on to say that probably only 40% of the book sunk in on the first pass. It's one you'd have to read three times to start to get to grips with it and I don't feel I have the stomach for that right now. The writing style was so laboured and fragmented as it flipped back and forth between bash and zsh it just tended to confuse me.

I would much prefer to see some complicated example build up gradually and explaining code every step of the way.
I particularly hated chapter 4 and 8. (Entering & editing the command line/files and directories). These chapters left me cold.
It's obvious the authors know their stuff, but they don't seem to convey things in a way that you can master stuff and understand things in a gradual process that builds your expertise up.
A lot of dispersed snippets were given and insufficient background information was given to make it sink in for me on a first read.

I just hope I can find a better Z shell guide somewhere on the Internet.

PS: I noticed somebody disagreed with my review of this book. Would be good if they could explain how P110 makes sense. Says .bashrc is for the interactive (terminal) mode and .bash_profile is one of a few for login mode. Proceeds to if you want all 'interactive' bash shells to run you can put an appropriate command in ~/.bash_profile. I think 'interactive' should be removed from the sentence. It's redundant and confuses. So you put . ~/bashrc in ~/bash_profile. so the login version calls into the interactive one. Then later it sets up an aliases file, and proceeds to put it, into both the .bashrc and .bash_aliases. What's the point? If you've included it in the interactive one already, the login one will pick it up. This in my opinion is indicative of the whole book. A confusing mess. Leave a comment if you were the one disagreeing explaining this! Read more ›

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