Thanks to O’Reilly I had the chance to read ‘Bash cookbook’ and this is what I think of it…

Even though it is called ‘Bash cookbook’ one can still read it front to back. The book starts with very simple recipees for people new to UNIX shells and/or Bash itself and then gives some advanced recipees for some common everyday tasks. Therefore, whether you are new to bash and/or shell scripting I recommend you to read from the begining to the end. If you are an intermediate or and advanced user I recommend you to read through the table of content and pick up a few recipees to solve common everyday tasks for which you always wanted to write scripts but have never done it because you might have felt too lazy or you have never had the time to do it. If you wrote a script or a command to run a given task, You would probably see that there is a more straightforward solution than the one you used to apply.

The author not only gives you a solution to common problems he also discusses about the other possible solutions and that makes it very interesting. In some recipees he gives some tips that I would have never thought about. The part I enjoyed the most is the one dealing with the standard input and output because this is basically what I use everyday. You will learn how to use grep, awk, cut, tee (and others) and how to combine them efficiently. I sometimes notice that bash acts weirdly (for instance when you only want to list hidden files and directories) and I never know why. This book gave me clear explanations for these common issues.

The table of content is very well written, clear and concise. Should you be looking for a solution to solve a common issue you will find it in there.

All in all, this is a really good reference and I am not done using it.