Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,
I am quite new to UNIX Scripting and want to learn it from scratch, a book which gives lot of examples, how to troubleshoot, how to run etc.. would be great.

Need help from all the experts out there to suggest one book to start with.

Regards,
Vikas

I would suggest "Unix Shell Programming" by Kochan and Wood. Stephen Kochan is such a great author. I have read several of his books. I have a lot of O'Reilly books, but prefer Kochan and Wood in this case, especially for learning.

You should also figure which shell you want to learn. I use the closely related sh and bash, and like those. You may have noticed there is a dislike of csh on this forum. I share that dislike. I've never seen the point of learning ksh, but perhaps there are others who can better advise you on that.

Good luck with your learning. This is a very powerful and interesting thing to learn.

Hi Hanson, thanks a lot for your quick reply.What would be best way to go ahead with learning on my laptop, I Google sometime back and found "cygwin" is one of the option.

Also does the above books available in ".pdf" format?

I use and like ubuntu. Others perhaps like cygwin, to run on a windows PC. I prefer using a separate Unix computer, such as ubuntu. There are also dual-boot setups, but I have never gotten into that.

I would not know what to recommend for a downloadable pdf. I prefer a professional book, written by a professional author. But it's also possible there are some good learning resources produced by the bash project. I don't know. I use the bash manual. But I would not recommend it for learning bash.

Of all the common Unix shells, the Korn Shell is most of the active development takes place.

Advantages of the Korn Shell over Bash include:

- support for floating point arithmetic
- support for date arithmetic
- support for multidimensional arrays
- compound variables and objects

and lots more.