Reviews for Unix Made Easy: The Basics and Beyond!

1. from humble beginner to poweruser after reading one book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2006

   'Unix Made Easy: The Basics and Beyond!' by John Muster is probably the best
   user guide I've ever seen.
   It can help users of any flavour of Unix to become powerusers in no time.
   So far I've tested what's written in the book on two Unix-like systems, one
   being OpenBSD and another is Mac OS X. Both of them have 4.4BSD-Lite as
   predecessor with Mac OS X incorporating few tools from SVR4 (System V Release
   4) Unix.
   
   First I should mention book's layout. It is very well thought out and very
   logical. You won't find strange commands without proper clarifications. There
   is crystal clear explanation for every single command which is presented and
   it is later incorporated into some sort of summarizing table/diagram.
   Even better in my opinion was strategy in providing information. Book's title
   is not deceptive at all. The book starts with such simple examples and proceeds
   so smoothly that by the end of the first chapter I knew more about general usage
   of Unix's tools then after reading whole 'Learnig Unix for Mac OS X Tiger' by
   Dave Taylor (well, I exaggerate bit but not much).
   
   Although I used BSD's flavors and pdksh/bash shell for testig examples and doing
   excercises (have I mentioned that there are tons of them, not all being easy?),
   way to complete every particular task is described for both System V and BSD
   flavors, and for both popular shell families, C-like shells (csh, tcsh) and
   Bourne-like shells.
   
   To make long story shorter: it is a great book. It has few mistakes, mostly due
   to the fact of being rather old and due to large number of Unix flavours. As
   OpenBSD developers like to say: "Read man pages! That's the ultimate FAQ!".
   Make no mistake in assuming that I complain. When I say 'few' I mean it literally.
   On first 120 pages I encountered only two instructions which I could not follow
   straight away. Both of them were related to $var, and these could be different
   from one shell to another, even if these shells are closely related, like Korn
   shell (ksh) and public domain Korn shell (pdksh). Some of the chapters could be
   irrelevant for you, for example if you prefer emacs to vi, chapter on vi is of
   theoretical interest, but tools described are basic and present on every Unix
   system, even if one doesn't use/like them.

2. Great book for the UNIX beginner

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2004

   I Bought this book with a few other UNIX books, because I discovered, that the MacOS X Unix books relied to much on the version current at the time of writing. That meant using Developer tools outdatet, how to fix problemes that had been fixed i later versions and how to set up the different utilities that comes with a MacOS X client cd/dvd. I wanted to know more about UNIX in it self, and the decided what I wanted to do next. Unix made Easy turned out to be an exellent choice. You start from scratch Unix vise an slowly you build on what you learned in previous chapters decovering why unix is so beloved by people who knows how to use it. The book gave me an idea of what I wanted to learn more about, and as turned out to be a great stepping stone as I move further into the world of Unix. The reason why I cannot give et 5 stars is because of its use as af referencemanual. I think practical Unix is better at that. Later then I have become even better at Unix than now I will proberly be using my copy of Unix for the Impactient a lot more.

3. great for begginers

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, August 12rd, 1998

   this is the ultimate self-teaching tool for beggining Unix users. I too took the class long ago in a far away land. Mr. Muster is an excellent teacher