Book Reviews

Bash Cookbook is a great book for anyone who is interested in learning more about bash and shell scripting. The book starts off with its first chapters dedicated to beginners and learning what bash is, how the prompt works, and how exactly shell scripting works. As the book progresses further, the examples and topics get to an intermediate level, and finally end with an advanced level. The book is packed with wonderful examples and full explanations of all parts of bash.

I had very little knowledge of bash and any sort of scripting before reading this book. I started at the beginning even though I knew some of the topics that were covered, but I still learned things from the tips, which are scattered throughout the book. This book is a good fit for anyone that has very little experience. It explains every type of variable, how to make them, their uses, and shows examples of them in use. It does the same for loops, logic and arithmetic, and every other topic covered in the book. At the very end of the book there are nearly one hundred pages of appendixes which are a wonderful resource full of tables and sample code.

I feel very comfortable after reading this book to do more advanced tasks with bash and shell scripting. I strongly suggest this book to anyone who is interested in leaping into a UNIX shell for the first time. The book is very up to date as it was published in May of 2007, and I plan to use it as a reference for every bash questions I could have.

Learning Ruby is a great book for experts and novices that are looking to learn Ruby. It effectively addresses the needs of people who are learning Ruby as their first programming language and people who already know many languages. This book shows many good code examples that demonstrate the power of the language in an easy to understand way while showing good programming techniques. It flows in a very easy to follow fashion with one section immediately building on the previous.

I feel comfortable after reading this book to use Ruby for basic scripting tasks and application development. I look forward to learning more about the language after seeing the power that it has to offer to a programmer. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning Ruby as a first language. If you are looking to learn some of the more in-depth features of Ruby I would suggest looking at O'Reilly's Ruby Cookbook.

Beginning Perl really is an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn the language – novice to expert. Even if you have absolutely no programming experience, the book starts out from the beginning by covering not only things you will need to know to learn Perl, but also good general programming practices. If you are an expert programmer, the book is written in a way that makes it easy to scan through and pick up on some things that you may not know or refresh your memory on some things that may not be completely clear. The index in the back is also great for use as a reference. Nothing can compare to the usefulness of a good Internet search engine (see Google) for use as a reference, but the book does quite a good job. It is nice to have something tangible in front of you to walk you through some tutorials and build up your knowledge of the language in a methodical way.

Personally, the book has helped me to become comfortable using Perl to do "everyday tasks" (everyday in the context of an obsessive computer user), perform my necessary job functions (manipulating massive text files), and become a better programmer. I used to know next to nothing about Perl, although I did have a solid background in other languages. With this book, and some help from the Internet, I was able to become a sufficient Perl programmer within a week.

Perl is a great language that every person in the computing field should know. There's literally hundreds of great tutorials and books on the subject that will suffice, but I would stress the value of having a well-written book sitting in front of you while you learn. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn Perl.