From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the

Command Line by Peter Stephenson

Great Info!

Some areas are covered in other books, but this one goes into some
little-seen side streets and alleyways to show you the shortcuts to more
efficient use of the shell. ...The material here is invaluable: youre not going
to get it from the manual pages! I strongly recommend it.

— Ernest J. This is a totally neat idea for a book... the command
line gets addictive quickly.

— Bill Ryan, Bills House O Insomnia

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&emdash;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&emdash;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.

Personal Review: From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the
Command Line by Peter Stephenson

I work on multiple Unix platforms all day long. I had never really taken the
time to learn about the shells, but I had picked up the basics over time. I
knew how to run commands, string them together with pipes, and redirect
their output into files. So when I tell you that I started learning new things
in the first chapter of From Bash to Z Shell, you will know the coverage is
in depth. If you are a casual shell user, or even less experienced, this
book has a lot to offer you.

From Bash to Z Shell is organized into three parts. Part one is an
introduction to shell basics. It focuses on typical interactions with a shell
including all of the things I mentioned knowing before reading this book.
There is surprisingly good depth even here though and I doubt that anyone
short of a power user could make it through this section without picki ng up
a new trick or two. I learned multiple things from each chapter in this
section.

In part two, each chapter takes a single aspect of the shells and really
focuses in on just that. You will find chapters about the startup files each
shell invokes as well as shell command histories. This is comprehensive
coverage that really gets you to understand how things work as well as
how to tune them to your personal tastes. You are even less likely to not
pickup great tips in here.

The third and final part of the book turns to shell programming. While I
suspect that plenty of users interact with a shell regularly without getting
much into scripting them, there are still useful tidbits in here for them too.
For example, after reading this section, I added s ome code to my startup
file to customize my shell's completion functionality. I can now tab-
complete the server names used by my workplace and even file system
paths on those servers. This section also has a very good chapter on
variables that will definitely help in day to day usage. A couple of the final
chapters in here are heavily slanted towards or exclusively about the Z
Shell though, so those chapters don't hold much for users of other shells.

As the title suggests, the book extensively covers bo th the Bash shell,
which seems to be the standard default on many Unix systems now, and

the feature-rich Z Shell that power users seem to favor. Surprisingly
though, the book does talk about many other shells. In the first part
especially, features tend to be described for more than just the two shells
with top billing. This falls off in the later parts to some extent though. Also,
the authors clearly aren't fans of the C Shell or its derivative the T C-Shell,
so fans of those will want to look elsewher e. Windows receives some
screen time, but only from the angle of running Unix-like environments and
shells on it. You won't find coverage of the native Windows shells in these
pages.

The book is quite good at covering the similarities of the shells. They
frequently tell you when some command will work unchanged in both Bash
and the Z Shell and they always do their best to give two equivalent
commands when there are differences. This makes the shell knowledge
you pick up from reading quite portable. It's also nice for those who don't
know much about the differences between the shells and thus are trying to
learn enough to pick the right one for them. It helped me choose a
favorite. The only downside of this is that the transitions seem to become
less smooth late in the book and I found myself wondering if we were still
talking about Bash or had moved on to Z Shell a few times. This is a minor
complaint though.

Beyond covering the shells well, the book can also help you better
understand the design of the Unix operating system. It has some great
asides on things like process forking and child process inheritance, special
files and devices, and terminal drivers. Seeing these items through their
interactions with a shell can make them significantly easier to grasp.

The writing style of this book is very natural. That's important since it
distills so much information into every page, you could easily begin to feel
overwhelmed. Luckily, that wasn't the case at all for me. I found the
material to be presented so naturally that I absorbed it with ease. The
book also has abundant cross references and a strong index which will
make it great to reference later.

The final measure of a book like this turns out to be how much it changed
your daily work habits. I've already noticed dramatic differences. I'm using
shell loops at the command-line now to process many files at once; I
actually understand shell quoting and when to use which types of quotes
and escapes to get the desired effect; I can easily strip off a file extension
or get a directory name from a full path when I need one; I make constant
use of the command history now whether I'm searching for a past
command, correcting a typo, or just pulling a single argument out of a
previous command for reuse in a new command; and I've written a few
shell functions to provide shortcuts to my common tasks. I just naturally
began doing these things too, I didn't have to work at it a lot. From Bash to
Z Shell just raised my understanding that much. To me, tha t's a big selling
point.

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