Customer comments on this selection.
 Technically sound but poorly written
I bought this book to brush up on my Unix skills, but I am disappointed in the quality. The author obviously knows the subject, but the writing style is excessively wordy and repetitive. For example, in the first chapter, he spends 7 pages talking about logging in, then spends only 3 pages talking about the shell.
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br /Of course, it takes a team to make a book truly bad. A competent editor should have corrected these issues, especially given that this is a second edition.
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br /I would not recommend this book to anybody. Beginners will find it confusing, and those who already have some experience will find it to be boring and tedious.
 Some good lessons - Not for a beginner
I bought this book to review it as a possible text for a class I am teaching next year. I teach students with learning disabilities and need something that is easy to understand, as well as straight forward with a logical layout to the lessons. Although I understood most of the lessons (I have a couple years of FreeBSD and OS X experience under my belt), many of them were difficult to understand. If you want to brush up on your UNIX skills, this may be a good book to do it with, but unless you have a good deal of experience to help you along, this book will not help greatly.
This is an awful book
This book is confusing and poorly written. It is wordy in the extreme. It dwells interminably on some simple things (logging in) and flies by some complex things (like what a shell is).
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br /I can not think of a worse introduction to Unix. You will be far better off going to Google and searching for "Unix Primer".
 Well organized but poorly executed
This book is a helpful intro to Unix and reasonably well organized. However, the text and many of the examples are badly written and confusing. As an IT veteran, it was merely annoying. The novice should steer clear of this book and look for something better.
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br /Take back the technical editor's paycheck...
 the virtues of the command line
Can you really learn unix in 10 minutes? Well, Shimonski gives it a hearty try. Actually, I'm sure the title is tongue in cheek. Absorbing this book will take most readers longer. But only a few hours at the most.
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br /He has managed to strip unix down to a core of simple and often used commands. Mastery of which takes you through many common unix situations. If you come from a Microsoft or Mac background, what may strike you about this book is the almost total absence of screen captures. Where'd the GUI go? Culture clash, you might say. The reality is that historically, unix arose before bitmapped consoles. But, even today, as you should hopefully understand from the book, you can be more productive at the command line.
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br /Speaking of GUIs, though, Shimonski does briefly explains X Windows, which is the native windowing system of every unix implementation.
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br /The deliberate brevity of the book means that he can only touch about each topic. But there's enough to get you usefully started.
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