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title = "Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Shantanu Tushar"
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date = 2016-01-13
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "shantanu tushar", "reviews", "it", "shell script",
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"2 stars"]
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+++
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10370134-linux-shell-scripting-cookbook):
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This cookbook is for beginners or intermediate Linux users who want to master
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writing Bash shell scripts. Intermediate/advanced users, system
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administrators, developers, and programmers can use it as a reference when
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they face problems while coding. Each recipe contains step-by-step
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instructions about everything necessary to execute a particular task. The book
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is designed so that beginners can read it from start to end while advanced
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users can just open it at any chapter and start following the recipes as a
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reference. It covers most of the commands on Linux with a variety of use cases
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accompanied by plenty of examples and guides you on implementing some of the
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commonest Linux commands with recipes that handle operations or properties
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related to files like searching and mining inside a file with grep. It also
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shows how utilities like sed, awk, grep, and cut can be combined to solve text
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processing problems. The focus is on saving time by automating activities with
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a few lines of script.
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<!-- more -->
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{{ stars(stars=2) }}
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I don't know why, but when I saw the title, I expected to be a book only about
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bash. Bash is a shell for *nix based systems and, as VIM, is one of the apps
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you can use for 10 years and, after reading something about it, you find
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something completely new.
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Thing is, this is not just about bash. This book is about tools in the GNU
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system that can help write shell scripts. And even if you're pissed about
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Stallman asking to call the system GNU/Linux, this *is* about GNU tools: tr,
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expect, find... All GNU tools.
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So "GNU Shell Scripting Cookbook" would be a more appropriate title.
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About the content itself... It's mostly a miss than a hit. Some things are
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some wrong it hurts (Git does *not* add a `.git` directory inside every
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directory, it creates one at the base directory of the project) and some are
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so utterly stupid to the point of being dangerous (you don't need root to
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chown a file!). Some points are so strange, they seem like the authors used a
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GNU/Linux for only two months and decided to write a book about it.
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The book have two authors and it shows. Lots of repeated information, some
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things not building on things already said (really guys? Not matching pipe
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with stdin/stdout redirection?) will give you the impression that they never
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spoke about the book or had a roadmap for it. And there is a shitton of "as
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follows" (seriously, you'll get sick of reading "as follows" over the book).
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It says in the cover that, besides the two authors, there were at least 5
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reviewers. But it seems none of them actually read the book -- and I'm not
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talking about easy things to find in a 1 minute Google search (like the git
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thing), but things like "this 'as follows' is getting through my nerves,
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you're using it every-fucking-where".
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The content gets better in the end, when it gets over the "teaching phase",
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but you'll still have the bad taste of things wrong from the previous
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chapters.
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So, basically, the book tries to cater to two different audiences -- the
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beginner and the master -- and doesn't seem to be able to provide a good
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content for any.
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