Unix User's Handbook (Hewlett-Packard professional books) Book

Applications come and applications go, but Unix remains a constant force. Knowledge of this reliable, eminently scalable operating system will never go out of style, and you'll never regret having a high-quality Unix reference such as Unix User's Handbook around. This super-sized, hardback volume contains (in a logical structure) everything you need to know in order to become a Unix guru. Which means that by having this book around, you can do a reasonable job of faking your guru status until you absorb the body of Unix knowledge. Marty Poniatowski has done a great job of integrating straight "type this to get that" tutorial material with more holistic text about Unix's design.A typical chapter begins with a command you can issue at the command prompt. Poniatowski then proceeds to explain what the output of that command is, what it means, and how it fits into the larger Unix scheme. He'll then expand upon individual points of his explanation with further digressions into other commands, with tables that explain alternate syntaxes and switches as appropriate (there are some helpful diagrams, too, but screen shots of graphical interfaces are of poor quality). You can learn a lot by reading his chapters straight through, or you can rely on the index to steer you straight to the explanation you want in most cases. Poniatowski doesn't attempt to rebuild Rome, by the way. He concludes every chapter with the HP-UX man pages for commands he discusses there (the contents of the man pages, however, aren't indexed). Chapters on the fundamentals of software development with C and on TCP/IP networking are particularly strong, making this a great buy. --David Wall, Amazon.com Topics covered: The Unix operating system (generically, with perhaps a slight tint of HP-UX), treated comprehensively for the benefit of new users in need of introductions and more accomplished users who need a reference. Chapters deal with the filesystem, several shells (bash, korn, and c), the vi text editor, network setup and management, and graphical user interfaces. A couple of excellent chapters introduce the reader to Windows NT integration (with Samba, among other tools) and Unix software development. Read More