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title = "Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Shantanu Tushar"
date = 2016-01-13
[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "shantanu tushar", "reviews", "it", "shell script"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10370134-linux-shell-scripting-cookbook):
This cookbook is for beginners or intermediate Linux users who want to master
writing Bash shell scripts. Intermediate/advanced users, system
administrators, developers, and programmers can use it as a reference when
they face problems while coding. Each recipe contains step-by-step
instructions about everything necessary to execute a particular task. The book
is designed so that beginners can read it from start to end while advanced
users can just open it at any chapter and start following the recipes as a
reference. It covers most of the commands on Linux with a variety of use cases
accompanied by plenty of examples and guides you on implementing some of the
commonest Linux commands with recipes that handle operations or properties
related to files like searching and mining inside a file with grep. It also
shows how utilities like sed, awk, grep, and cut can be combined to solve text
processing problems. The focus is on saving time by automating activities with
a few lines of script.
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I don't know why, but when I saw the title, I expected to be a book only about
bash. Bash is a shell for *nix based systems and, as VIM, is one of the apps
you can use for 10 years and, after reading something about it, you find
something completely new.
Thing is, this is not just about bash. This book is about tools in the GNU
system that can help write shell scripts. And even if you're pissed about
Stallman asking to call the system GNU/Linux, this *is* about GNU tools: tr,
expect, find... All GNU tools.
So "GNU Shell Scripting Cookbook" would be a more appropriate title.
About the content itself... It's mostly a miss than a hit. Some things are
some wrong it hurts (Git does *not* add a `.git` directory inside every
directory, it creates one at the base directory of the project) and some are
so utterly stupid to the point of being dangerous (you don't need root to
chown a file!). Some points are so strange, they seem like the authors used a
GNU/Linux for only two months and decided to write a book about it.
The book have two authors and it shows. Lots of repeated information, some
things not building on things already said (really guys? Not matching pipe
with stdin/stdout redirection?) will give you the impression that they never
spoke about the book or had a roadmap for it. And there is a shitton of "as
follows" (seriously, you'll get sick of reading "as follows" over the book).
It says in the cover that, besides the two authors, there were at least 5
reviewers. But it seems none of them actually read the book -- and I'm not
talking about easy things to find in a 1 minute Google search (like the git
thing), but things like "this 'as follows' is getting through my nerves,
you're using it every-fucking-where".
The content gets better in the end, when it gets over the "teaching phase",
but you'll still have the bad taste of things wrong from the previous
chapters.
So, basically, the book tries to cater to two different audiences -- the
beginner and the master -- and doesn't seem to be able to provide a good
content for any.