Book Notes: Learning the bash Shell
Learning the bash Shell, 3rd Edition
Cameron Newman and Bill Rosenblatt
335 pages. O’Reilly, 2005, $35.
Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR
Learning the bash Shell is a Unix book, which tells all about bash, or the “Bourne Again Shell”. So why, on this Mac-centric blog, do I mention this book? Because if you’re a Terminal maestro, you probably use bash. (Though you may be using a different shell, such as tcsh or zsh.) Bash is the default shell in Mac OS X, and has been since Panther.This new edition of Learning the bash Shell covers bash version 3.0, which is more recent than the version included with Mac OS X Tiger; in spite of this, it provides excellent coverage of the changes between different versions, so Mac users will have no trouble getting the lowdown on this shell.
I’ve used the previous editions of this book, and find it the best way to get more productive on the command line. After all, when you work with Terminal, all your commands go through a shell. If you use bash, this book helps you save time, set variables, edit commands, and much more. In fact, if you haven’t read a book about using the command line (such as my book, The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood), you probably don’t realize just how much you can do with bash.
This is an essential book for all users of the command line, at least those who use bash. Mac users take note: this is the only comprehensive book about bash available. It will help you go much further with your command line activities.
Read more articles in this category: Mac OS X Command Line
