Thanks to Ed Schaefer and UnixReview.com for the nice review of Wicked Cool Shell Scripts in the most recent issue. Ed cuts to the chase:
Should You Buy the Book?
Taylor makes no effort to teach shell scripting. This book is not a tutorial, but with the author’s explanations a beginner should have little trouble understanding his scripts. In fact, if you have little scripting background, the first four chapters could provide your introduction to Unix.
I’m working on the Web site for Creating Cool Web Sites and just realized that the little Unix trick I used while editing a file is actually a beautiful example of why so many people love Unix so much, so I thought I’d share it. The problem: a file where lines have 1-10 words + a last field value (in this case, a page number) that I don’t want. The challenge is to figure out how to easily remove that last field, when there are a variable number of fields on the line.
A reader writes:
“I’ve got a few of your books and today picked up Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, which I’m very much looking forward to working with.
“Totally greenhorn question, though: I want to keep the scripts in ~/bin and on page 12 you have an italic note saying to edit our PATH variable, but I’m not sure how, and don’t see any instructions anywhere else as to how to do this. I would be perfectly happy to have ~/scripts as you suggest but have not been able to create either. Your other book
Learning Unix for Mac OS X doesn’t appear to show how to do this with BASH. Many thanks in advance.”
A reader writes:
Here is the problem – when I su to become root I don’t have any aliases or any stuff in my path. I also am not sure were the .bash_profile for root goes and if it is even read when su’ing – please help thanks.
A nice compliment to the review of Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther is a new review just posted of Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, which you can read at linc.homeunix.org. An excerpt: “There is definitely something for everyone in this book, and I, particularly, found the chapters dealing with web hacks and administration really
Curious about Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther? There’s a very nice review at Mac Companion, wherein the reviewer says: “This is the 3rd Edition of the book to cover Mac OS X 10. It could easily be the beginning of a series for Mac OS X folks. I’m looking forward to the Advanced Edition! This one walks through the Terminal mode Unix garden of delights. The Authors obviously know their stuff and are not at all shy about showing how to navigate around Unix as presented in Panther.”
A reader writes:
I know about the “.htaccess” file as a way of protecting entire directories, but I’m wondering if I can use the “.htaccess” file to require a username and password in order to access a single file while allowing the rest of the directory to remain open?
We’re getting closer and closer to publication date with my latest HTML/CSS/JavaScript book, Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML and CSS. We’re done with the writing and editing – and it’s going to be a really excellent book, I’ve worked with a great team on this – and now it’s the fun of designing and developing a cover look. And here it is, in first prototype form…
