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Unix Tutorials

People keep asking me for a good introductory book on practical unix. I've never discovered a book on the subject that really excites me, but this book seems pretty good, which is more than one can say for most such:

Unix Made Easy, McGraw-Hill 1990, ISBN 0-07-881576-2.

Here's a book a like a lot:

Life With Unix: A Guide For Everyone, by Libes and Ressler. Prentice-Hall 1989, ISBN 0-13-536657-7

Unix has been (and largely continues to be) an oral tradition more than a written one: This book is essentially a distillation of net unix culture, lovingly reduced to written form.

Life With Unix gives you a huge step up on "going native" as a unixoid, should you desire to do so: A history of unix, a survey of unix today, a peer into the unix future, an annotated bibliography of unix resources (from books to netnews to conferences), an overview of Unix from the user's, programmer's and system administrator's perspectives, dresscodes for unixfolk, a survey of unix applications...

This book isn't best of breed in any of the technical areas it covers, but it is an outstanding overall introduction to unixthink and the unixworld, an enjoyable read, and a rich source of pointers to further material. Highly recommended.


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