Unix Shell book and Perl for beginner

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 6/1/10 12:10 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 08:53:22AM -0700, Dave Peters wrote:
>   
>> Any suggestion for a good unix shell book and a perl book for beginner? I plan to teach my kids.
>> Thanks.
>>     
> For Perl, the usual is "Learning Perl" by that nefarious criminal,
> Randall Schwartz.  My advice would be to just skip chapter 1 entirely.
>   

I learned Perl from this classic tutorial:

http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/Perl/start.html

It is concise yet accessible.  Although written for Perl 4, I believe
the content is still usable in Perl 5, and should certainly be
accessible for kids.  Are they learning from this, or are you learning
from it, and then transferring the knowledge to them?

> For the shell, I believe I used this book:
>
>   http://www.amazon.com/Shell-Programming-Revised-Stephen-Kochan/dp/067248448X
>
> There are certainly more current books available, but I thought this
> book (if it is indeed the one I learned with) did a particularly
> servicable job of teaching the subject.
>   

And at 1¢ for a used copy, who could go wrong?  It has just inspired me
to buy a copy for myself.

What I have always struggled with when trying to introduce new users to
the Unix shell environment is to establish what their requirements are. 
There is all of the shell-related syntax, then there are all of the
"common" Unix commands people regularly use, and then there are the
advanced topics of process management, bash scripting, file handles,
etc.  I've never found a good web tutorial which covers the mix of these
things in a quick and accessible way -- perhaps there is simply too much
for all these topics to be covered in something "short".  The list of
tutorials I currently point people at are here:

http://portal.nebiogrid.org/devel/unix/

and for my own reference, I regularly look at:

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

Ian