[.ca] Unix Power Tools (ISBN 0596003307)

From Amazon.com:
Unix Power Tools, with its accompanying CD-ROM, contains thousands of tips, scripts, and techniques that make using Unix easier, more effective, and even fun. It details tricky yet powerful commands such as find, xargs, tar, and grep and shares expertise from O'Reilly's Nutshell handbooks, Usenet, and the authors. The authors supply descriptions and solutions of real-world problems and give you the ability to analyze and solve them creatively. Designed for both beginning Unix users and programmers, this 1,000-page tome is designed for browsing rather than reading cover to cover.

Excellent:
The power drill on the cover of UNIX Power Tools is very appropriate for this book, which is a collection of articles, various information, and tips on how to more effectively use the UNIX operating system. UNIX is of course a complex OS, and yet even novices can use UNIX after learning a few simple commands. And yet one can also harness much more of UNIX's power by learning its complexities. This book is an excellent reference, showing just how much more useful UNIX can be when you keep learning more about it. It is full of tips and information designed to make your time using UNIX to be more efficient and even fun. With a book of over 1000 pages, there's something on virtually every topic of UNIX here. And you can "jump around" to different parts of the book to learn more about a particular feature or "power tool." Vi for example has always been a favorite of mine, much to the chagrin of some of my friends, and there's a chapter or two of Vi "tricks" to try out. Emacs is a screen editor that I also like, and again there's a chapter devoted to "EMACS tricks." Of course in a book this size, just about everything imaginable regarding the UNIX operating system is covered here, everything from customizing and interacting with your shell environment, to working with files and directories, the UNIX kernel, lots of information about scripting, to security issues. Whether you're a UNIX programmer, sys admin, or "UNIX hobbyist" like me, this book is an invaluable resource.

the most tattered book on my shelf:
Let's get a couple things straight: one, I buy a lot of books; two, I read about 15% of each one. This book is one of the few exceptions. It already had 56 reviews when I wrote this, but after picking it up for the 84th time, I felt compelled to add my five stars. Buy with confidence.

Essential Resource and Makes UNIX Fun:
This book is not a general tutorial, so if that is all you are after, then is not for you. However, if you are a novice or you are an expert, or in between, then this book is an essential resource to have amongst your collection. There are so many useful scripts, tools, and tutorials woven together is different topic areas. There are also a lot of fun stuff thrown in, like how to configure your c-shell prompt to be like the familiar DOS prompt showing directory path. Interestingly, in some parts, I find it to be a good reference and sometimes the only reference for certain tools and commands. For example, this book extensively covered and illustrated the 'find' command, which is very powerful and often used in the industy. There were not only good explanations, but comprehensive examples as well. I could not find any reference of 'find' with examples in any other published book. I think this book gives impressive coverage of other essential, yet seldom, documented tools.

super:
as I recall I read this book from cover to cover and it was an extremely useful book. I highly recommend this book for anyone doing system administration type work or hobby.

Everything I wanted to know; but even more I probably didn't:
Have to say it; but if you've been let down by these other books --i.e. going into long beginer tips and how to "set up KDE" and the likes ...... this one book probably has more usefull information than the 31 other books I've collected over the past year or so on the same info .......... BUY IT@!!!!!! I don't regret it for a second ..... everyday i've had it (about 3 months) i've randomly opened a page and learned something that usually i didn't even know was possible ( and I've been using Unix/Linux for almost 4 years or more -- Linux meaning Slackware, and Unix meaning the BSD's ) I'm rather impressed none-the-less!!!!