For the newbies (book question)

[Tom Buskey]

On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 09:27, Mark Komarinski wrote:
> Allow me to also add:
> 
> UNIX Shell Programming (Kochan and Wood, Hayden Books)
>   10ish years old, but still worthwhile if you're writing sh or csh
>   covers the shells and some of the more commonly-used tools
>   in shell scripting.  But, no gnu versions or coverage of bash/tcsh.

The best shell programming book I've seen.  I have the 1st edition.  It
does have an appendix on csh stuff.  It also predates bash and even
ksh93.  Leaving out csh for shell programming is a good thing IMHO
unless you're debugging/converting csh scripts.

Portable Shell Programming is also excellent.  The O'Reilly KSH book
isn't anything special but the KSH debugger is worth getting.  I haven't
tried the Bash debugger yet. 

> 
> Programming Perl (Wall, Christiansen, & Schwartz, O'Reilly)
>   Excellent combination of tutorial and reference.  I don't code
>   in perl as much as I used to, but when I do, this book gets cracked
>   open.
> 

I've found the Perl CD bookshelf to be excellent when coding.  The
search engine/web server runs on java so it's portable.  It's excellent
for searching for specific topics (configuration files...).  I wish I
could run all the O'Reilly CD bookshelves together.  You can run several
at once by hacking the scripts, but you'll be searching/browsing them
seperately.