Subject: Re: Various newbie questions
From: [email-masked] (bowman)

6 Jan 1999 23:07:09 -0800
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[email-masked] wrote:
> 
> Because of this, my first question is: can anyone recommend books that I can
> use to learn the various tools and compilers/interpreters (i.e. shell
> scripting, tcl/tk)? I'd just like a general overview of Unix or Gnu tools.

The best documentation is the man or info entries for the tool in
question. These can be somewhat terse, and it is difficult to get an
overview, or find a cookbook solution. The trouble I've found with books
aimed at Unix or Linux is the very brief coverage of the tools that are
used with Cygwin or djgpp, versus detailed coverage of the *nix file
system, pine, elm, and other topics of no concern to someone not
actually running *nix. 

If you have a local bookstore where you can browse, you might look at
the Wrox Press _Instant Unix_, by Evans, Matthew, & Stones, and see if
it is what you want. It isn't great, but it seemed that of the selection
at the local B&N, that was the one that could provide an answer to most
of my questions on general *nix usage. For instance, it mentions X,
shows some examples, and has a brief discussion of how it fits into the
overall scheme. It does not address programming in the *nix environment.
_Programming with Unix System Calls and Libraries_ from Unix Press can
help if you are trying to port a piece of gnu software and need to
bridge the *nix/DOS/Windows usage differences. 

O'Reilly has an excellent series of books documenting the various tools
in depth. In fact, I've heard people claim the gnu docs suffer since ORA
offers commercial docs of such good quality. It would be expensive to
buy one for every tool or related tools, but if you need in depth
coverage of sed/awk, tcl, etc, look at these. I am fairly certain they
cover XWindows too.
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