This is in my opinion the best UNIX reference book on the market today. If you need to program or work in the OS you should own this book.

I've got two versions of this book: the blue cover version and the one that came in my CD bookshelf. I'm usually quite positive about nutshell books. Usually.

While this is pretty much the only one-stop Unix reference in town when you don't have the man pages to hand, there are some perplexing omissions from the "unix command" section. Nothing to do with networking, for example. No netstat, ifconfig, nslookup. Odd, in a world when a non-networked computer is surely a rarity. Yes, the stuff is probably in the networking O'Reilly books (mine are on order as I type) but you'd think in this day and age...

Yesterday I was flipping through and noticed there was no entry for "mount" or "umount" either.

You should probably own one of these if you have a job in the Unix computing biz, but before long you might find yourself asking "what will I need today that won't be in a nutshell?"

Seriously, O'Reilly should be looking into rewriting this little gem to make it properly comprehensive again.

Unix in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

Not a useful book for someone who wants to learn unix. It can be used for reference for someone who already knows UNIX. I bought it hoping that it will be a good introduction and summary. Disappointed.

Why did i buy this, for the simple reason as a new user a good comprehensive reference is extremely usefull and handy, and this is it, this is something i will all use or keep close at hand.

For those of you with the "animal" bookshelf, this is one of the better books to own. Lots of the stuff you need to know, but can never totally remember is here.

This is a review of the 3th edition of Unix in a nutshell. The book has almost 600 pages, roughly divided as follows:
- 200 p. on unix commands: good stuff, to the point, summaries of all commands, with examples.
- 100 p. on shells, (bash, kch, csh: good stuff, summary of commands, examples.
- 5 p. on pattern matching: way too short! Here I miss a good and thorough section on regular expressions !
- 40 p. on various editors (emacs, vi, ex): useful if you use them, I prefer a GUI editor these days.
- 30 p. on awk & sed: good stuff, but this should be expanded. I learned at lot here, but I still want to know more.
- 100 p. on stuff I never use (troff, mm ms me macros (?) ... )
- 50 p. on the make utility and related stuff only programmers use.

Bottom line: the sections on unix commands, csh, awk and sed are really good. The rest is only who those who really need it. And if you have never heard of it, you probably are not in this group. So the 'good half' of this book is nice to have as reference on your desk.

Advice: buy this book used for a few euro's and you cannot go wrong.

Unix in a Nutshell is not for the faint-hearted. It tries to be a concise reference on Unix but ends up being incomplete (esp. with regard to Linux). A lot of commands are explained cursorily without complete options or examples. The presentation is often confusing; witness the chapters on shell programming. If you know nothing about Unix, don't even consider this book; it'll get you nowhere and more frustrate than ever. If you already know Unix you can find better and more accurate Unix references elsewhere.

Unix in a Nutshell is not for the faint-hearted. It tries to be a concise reference on Unix but ends up being incomplete (esp. with regard to Linux). A lot of commands are explained cursorily without complete options or examples. The presentation is often confusing; witness the chapters on shell programming. If you know nothing about Unix, don't even consider this book; it'll get you nowhere and more frustrate than ever. If you already know Unix you can find better and more accurate Unix references elsewhere.

Great product and evyone needing to know Unix commands should have one around

This book is really useful for a Unix dummy like me.

I've bought every edition of this book, and I'm happy to keep
buying updates. The new edition has a lot of current stuff like
subversion and Linux. Don't compute without it.

It is good book, decent reference but if you like I'm just starting out get "UNIX Essentials and UNIX Core" DVD course. Yes it is pricey but you're getting precisely what you have been paying for. I found this book to be great but in the same time I found the DVD course to be unmatched. The ability to sit down and listen and watch and follow is can not be substituted with a book. If you are more on economy side, I found that there's no economy as I'm now of the subjects that with book like that, or with any other book it would take me forever to come up.
I read this book (along with other dozens) in a train to refresh and to get slightly different prospective however the TRAINING is with DVD as it pays back way faster.
I give these book 5 stars because it is nice book, and comparing apple to apples it is one good, useful book.

Arnold Robbins' UNIX IN A NUTSHELL, 4TH EDITION defines what UNIX means in a changing world where there is no standard-bearer, covering common parts of the leading Unix-like operating systems, how to understand and locate commands which work across versions, and how to use tools which have become a 'part' of Unix even though they don't ship with the operating system, from CVs and GNU Make to GDB, curl and wget. UNIX operating system users simply must have this reference.

Get this book because it is the way of stepping into UNIX for generations of professionals. There are few UNIX people around who on this or another stage of their career did not go through it. It also makes a great companion to "UNIX Essentials and UNIX Core" DVD and they complement one another nicely. It is a book to keep. I often go over some pages to refresh things.

Are you a Unix user, programmer or system administrator? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Arnold Robbins, has written an outstanding 4th edition of a book that presents the broader state of Unix in today's world.

Robbins, begins by covering Solaris 10, the latest version of the SVR4 operating system from Sun Microsystems, "GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X. Then, he revises and reorganizes the Unix Commands in order to cover the three systems. The author continues by covering Bash, ksh93, and tcsh. In addition, he covers the popular Bash shell, along with the 1988 and 1993 versions of ksh. The author also examines the widely-used tcsh shell instead of the original Berkeley. Then, the author looks at the package management programs, which are used for the program installation on popular GNU/Linux systems.
Next, he discusses GNU Emacs Version 21. Then, the author covers the vi and ex text editors. The author continues by covering GNU sed. In addition, he covers the awk programming language. The author also provides an introduction to source code management systems. Then, he looks at CVS. Next, the author discusses the Subversion version control system. Then, he focuses on GNU Make. The author continues by covering GDB debugger. Finally, he describes how to write a manual page.

In particular, it's important to cover in this most excellent book, both commercial variants, and those where source code for the system and the utilities are freely available. Furthermore, the commands covered by the current POSIX standard form the core of author's presentation here.

As someone has said that learning UNIX is not necessarily has to be a struggle. This book stood up to my expectations almost perfectly: it is very well written, easy to read and technically mostly correct. It doesn't overwhelm with technical details and doesn't press too much. I also followed an advise in someone's review and purchased "UNIX Essentials and Core" DVD (that is COOL!!!) complete UNIX course on DVD. These two nicely complement one another. You watch DVD and then you read a book. If you didn't catch it from the first try you always can play it over again. I was astonished of how much I have learned in two weeks! It certainly will not learn UNIX for you but it is a great help in memorizing of many things. I like this book and still keep it and review from time to time.

I took a UNIX class twelve years ago and the instructor referred to the various UNIX versions around at that time as the "31 flavors of UNIX." Since then, we've seen LINUX (and its various versions), Mac OS and Sun Solaris among others also appear. So along with "good old" System V and BSD and HP-UNIX and several other "older" versions, we have even more "UNIX flavors" now. And this new edition covers them all. The newly revised Unix command and Unix Shell chapters cover all the changes and also include information about the bash and tcsh shells. in fact, bash and tcsh have their own chapters.

There's also a chapter devoted to the Emacs editor, one of the first text editors I ever used. Also one for vi, another editor I use often. I have to admit a bit of sadness that the text formatting chapter on Nroff and Troff is gone (save for commands for writing man pages), but with LaTeK the program of choice nowadays, this was inevitable.

I really liked the previous versions of this book which let me look up commands on the fly whenever I needed to, but I'm glad to see this updated edition.

I still use the first edition of this book as a compact, easy to use reference for UNIX. It works well in a variety of UNIX flavors. It provides useful examples.

It is a very good resource for the computer professional who needs to use unix from time to time.

I hadn't used UNIX in well over ten years, but my current job required it, and I had to get up to speed fast. I couldn't have done it without Robbins' book. It is well organized and filled with plenty of examples. I also found "UNIX made easy" very helpful.

Sincerely,

Alex Alaniz Ph.D.

1. Please see the reviews of my own strong science fiction book: Beyond Future Shock about the near-terms perils and promise of advanced bio/nano technology in a world still roiled with Middle Age religious conflict and ever growing extreme wealth gradients.

2. I have REVIEWED many books from undergraduate to graduate in: PHYSICS, MATH, ECONOMETRICS, and HISTORY among other areas.