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Wicked Cool Shell Scripts
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Author: Dave Taylor
List Price: $29.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1593270127
Publisher: No Starch Press (15 January, 2003)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 1,304
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Try Scripting Web Applications
The book is aimed at all users and systems administrators of linux and every unix variant, including most importantly the MacOS. If you already know some scripting, you should be quite at ease here. Taylor does decide to restrict his discussion to the Bourne shell and its descendent, bash. He drops the C shell! But, as he points out, the scripts he gives can be easily rewritten in the latter if you desire.The book can be roughly divided into two parts. The first is essentially traditional scripting tasks. A user from 1988 would see original material here, but no qualitative surprises. The second half of the book is more interesting. It centres on Web applications. For example, when running a Web server that uses CGI, Perl and C are often the choice for implementing logic. But sometimes you can get by with a simpler approach - using a Bourne shell. Taylor shows how to do this to make simple web pages, with images, even. Cool! Though this outlook lacks the full expressive power of generating dynamic pages via Java Server Pages/Servlets, these latter alternatives can be quite forbidding to learn. If you are already comfortable with sed, awk, grep [etc], you may want to try this approach, provided your web site is not too complex. In summary, the web scripting approach suggested here may be the most distinctive and useful sections. Worth checking out.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Wickedly excellent!
I first laid eyes upon this book at a computer show; the publisher had a paper copy. This is a cool publisher with alot of cool books and as I browsed this one I realized that this was going to be another one. Yipppeee! It's finally out and it's even better with the real cover :)Okay, seriously now. This is a great book. Gets right to the point and it's much more fun to ready than other scripting books that I've seen. You get alot in a little space.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Surprised me
I often take a dim view of books that use superlatives in their titles. I also don't think there is anything "wicked cool" about shell scripting in general: if you need anything complex at all, Perl or something else is probably a much better way to to it. Shell scripting gets awfully nasty awfully fast.However, I was wrong. Yes, shell scripting is an abominable way to approach most of the tasks this book explores. Just the same, the author does it "wicked cool" and you can learn a lot both from how he sees the problem and the other Unix tools he uses as part of the script. So while you might shudder at the idea of writing a link-checker in Bash, the author's clever use of Lynx's "traverse" flag is something you might make use of elsewhere. You'll find useful things like that throughout the book, and even if you'd rather write it in Perl or whatever, the logic is worth examining. Mac OS X users will appreciate that a whole chapter is devoted to that. There's nothing particularly deep there, nothing you will be surprised by, but it's nice to see Mac get specific mention. That brings up another important point: shells are different and Unixes are different. The author does pay a lot of attention to the differences that can cause problems for your scripts when they need to run on different platforms.
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