TAYLOR, DAVE
Another one of my goals this year is to get familiar with Linux and shell scripting. I have some how to books, but I also picked up Dave Taylor`s Wicked Cool Shell Scripts 101 Scripts For Linux, Mac OS X, and UNIX Systems (No Starch Press). Taylor`s done a great job with this book. Chapter List: Introduction. The Missing Code Library. Improving on User Commands. Creating Utilities. Tweaking Unix. System Administration: Managing Users. System Administration: System Maintenance. Web and Internet Users. Webmaster Hacks. Web and Internet Administration. Internet Server Administration. Mac OS X Scripts. Shell Script Fun and Games. Afterword. Index Taylor didn`t write this book as a tutorial on script writing. Rather, he wanted to provide a cookbook of scripts that people could learn from and use immediately. He also wanted something more interesting than the scripts normally found in the how to books on the market. I`d agree that he`s accomplished his purpose. Each script starts with a listing of the code and an explanation of how it works. He shows you how to run the script and what the results of running the script should be. Finally, there`s a hacking the script paragraph that explains how you might want to modify the script to do something different. This entire package of paragraphs in each script serves as a sort of minilesson on some aspect of script writing. As I mentioned above, I`m not quite ready for this book right now. When I pick up some fundamentals, I`ll be heading into the Web and Internet Users section. There`s code there on using Lynx and shell scripts to strip out information from websites. I have a project in mind I`ve wanted to do for some time, and I think I finally found the tools that will allow me to do it.
