From: bowman AT montana DOT com (bowman) Subject: Re: Various newbie questions 6 Jan 1999 23:07:09 -0800 Message-ID: <36939EC3.6AB6E33E.cygnus.gnu-win32@montana.com> References: <918f20ee DOT 3692984e AT aol DOT com> Reply-To: bowman AT montana DOT com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: SWarsMatt AT aol DOT com, gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com SWarsMatt AT aol DOT com 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. - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".