unix

UNIX System Administration Handbook (3rd Edition)
$83.99
This book is good for the UNIX people. I received it in a very good condition.

Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
$64.99
This is the best $52 I have ever spent in my life. This book is really great. It provides very detailed information about UNIX functions.
I think every one should have this books at their desk. I love this book. :)

Sams Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours (4th Edition)
$39.99
The book does a good job with stepping into the world of UNIX. I felt the book is a good beginner's guide that will prepare you for further indepth education of the UNIX environment.

Unix Power Tools, Third Edition
$74.99
There's really nothing I can say in this review that isn't blatantly obvious from skimming the table of contents/sample pages from the product page here. It's a good book for understanding the low-level aspects of the common linux variants and how to do mundane, useful tasks from the command line, and I leave it in the john so I can skim through it and learn something while making my communion with nature.

However, what I find incredibly annoying and distracting is the authors' need to mindlessly put their initials after each paragraph that they write. The cover of the book says it all - there are four authors, and they wrote the book. Great. Good for them. They wrote a book. There's no need to remind the reader of every little inch of text that each of the four authors has individually contributed. It seems unprofessional, childish, and I've never seen anything like it anywhere before. The subject is not rocket science (most of the topics documented have been living in *nix systems for ages) and they didn't create any of it; they're simply telling us about it.

I mean, did these people say to themselves, "Wow! look at me! I wrote the section called 'The Superuser (Root)' and there are my initials to tell the world (and my grandma) about it; signed, '-ML.'" It's not like 'ML' actually had anything at all to do with creation of the concept of the superuser, so why does he/she feel the need to point out specifically to us that they wrote 3 little paragraphs describing it? I mean, if 'ML' was doing such great things, he/she probably would be doing far better things in life than writing books that folks like me read in the toilet.

If I bought a car, and everyone who'd designed every little piece of it felt the compulsion to put their initials on each little piece, people would laugh at me in such a car...but luckily this book lives in my bathroom where few people see it.

The consequent addition of maybe 50 pages that all of this superfluous initialing has created (ah ha! now I understand why they did it!) costs a star. Otherwise it would be a solid 4 star effort.