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Rating:  -
I like this book. I will recommend it to someone who has some bash experience since it's not organized as a reference or study guide.
Rating: -
More than ten years after the first edition of Learning the bash Shell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) came out, there appeared a book that sums up all the experience and expertise the authors have gained since those times using this shell. If you're new to Unix/Linux, start with the work linked in above, but if you have been using either of these systems for some time and you would like to learn how to make your life easier, then this is the book for you.
Why? Because it concentrates on teaching you how to solve your problems. After a brief introduction and setting the basics the real depth begins: 1. a problem, 2. developing a solution, 3. evaluating the solution. And lots of examples. Naturally, the first step is to recognise that you have a problem, which the book also teaches you: some people tend to suffer while doing a repetitive and uninteresting chore but does not even occur to them that it does not need to be so: they can turn the chore into a hunt for automatisation putting their brain to some creative use, so instead of numbing their mind they start sharping it, and this is exactly where this book comes in.
Presently, amazon.com does not offer you a look into the book, but you can have a preview of every chapter and also a full view of the table of contents at the publisher's page: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526788/toc.html. Than come back here, as Amazon's price is much better. (At the time of writing this, there is a 37% discount.)
Rating:  -
When I read the description the book said that "bash Cookbook" teaches shell scripting the way Unix masters practice the craft." Not even close. This book doesn't teach a thing. All it gives is "recipes-" solutions for problems that you may never even encounter. Also, these recipes are directed at people with a ton of experience in the shell already. They reference tons of commands with functions that vary over the entirety of what the shell can do without even an index that gives one sentence descriptions of the commands. I'm a novice. I don't know what cat, grep, eval, etc. do. And it is very annoying to have to read the book with my computer in my lap so I can reference the man pages. If you are a novice don't buy this book.
Rating: -
This book is indeed a "Cookbook"; nice examples on how to do lots of stuff. It is nicely categorized and the explanations/discussions are easy to follow. The authors seem to have lots of experience, and are honest enough to even explain when NOT to use bash; when for example perl would do better.
Highly recommended if you want to get stuff done using bash.
Rating: -
Currently this is the only book that specifically covers bash 3.2, the version that contain new and interesting features like =~ operator for "normal" regular expression matching.
The main advantage of the book that it really covers a lot of ground and provides system administrators and users with a lot of good and difficult to find tips about customizing of the environment and making yourself more productive.
Chapters 5-6 which provide good overview of new features introduced in version 3.x including "normal" regular expressions pattern matching ( operator =~) and C-style for loop. One problem with shells traditionally use two completely obsolete notations for regular expressions (basic regular expression often known as DOS-style regular expressions plus quite perverse prefix notation ). Bash 3.2 did not fixes this problem as this is a problem of Unix in general (Unix can be called an Os that uses a dozen of different definitions of regular expressions :-) that but at least added a normal regular expression notion to the list.
After chapters 5 and 6 I recommend reading chapters 9, 17 and 19 and then the rest. While chapters are of very uneven quality, usually you can find at least one useful tip in each.
The spectrum of bash related tips and useful mini-scripts is quote substantial. The authors cover classic things like customizing prompt quite well. The book is not only about bash it covers a lot of ground including use of classic Unix utilities in scripting (most notably grep, find, sort, and date) along with related topics such as use of pipes and I/O redirection.
Of course for such a complex topic there are some shortcomings. It's a pretty difficult task to write a good cookbook but authors did an excellent job and provided many very valuable tips that can help to improve both system administrators and power users productivity.
One of the problems for a cookbook is a good organization and specifically a good starting chapter and here authors failed. Some chapters are half-baked. The Chapter about version control is badly written and very superficial. The authors just mention a couple of system without any details. And in this topic the devil is in details.
Some bash features are explained superficially. For example bash has horrible implementation of pushd/popd/dirs troika and it not that easy to use them productively. One notable deficiency is that there is no way to suppress duplicates which in essence make this feature almost unusable. The authors treatment looks like a baseless advertizing of a poorly implemented feature.
But I hope that the authors will improve the book in the next edition and I am reluctant to downgrade the book based on those flaws. After all, this is a cookbook and it should be judged by the best recipes not the worst.
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