BKLRNUNX.RVW 940325 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. 103 Morris Street, Suite A Sebastopol, CA 95472 800-998-9938 707-829-0515 fax: 707-829-0104 info@ora.com or nouts@ora.com "Learning the UNIX Operating System", Todino/Strang/Peek, 1993, 1-56592-060-0 jerry@ora.com "Learning the UNIX Operating System" is stated to be intended to cover enough of the basics of UNIX to get a user started. Generally speaking, the book does just that. The Preface is a fairly standard introduction in the "nutshell" series, not so much an introduction to the topic as to the format of the book. Chapter one is where it really begins, getting the user to log in and log out of the system. Some attention is paid to familiarizing the user with the command line interface. A new chapter two gives an introduction to the X windowing system. Chapter three is entitled, "Your UNIX Account", but what it really covers is directory navigation, files and mail. Chapter four seems to cover some of the same ground in file management. Overall, though, the book has benefitted a great deal from revisions, and the material is much more lucid. Chapters five and six seem somewhat out of place. They cover redirection of I/0 and multi-tasking. While these topics are unquestionably important to UNIX itself, it is difficult to see that the novice user would have immediate need of them. The material, however, has been tightened up from earlier versions and has been clarified with examples more relevant to the needs of the novice. Chapter seven deals with the important issue of how to proceed beyond the scope of this work. The book concludes with a reading list and a brief but useful "cheat sheet" of commonly used commands. The book is labelled as a "single session overview", and very likely an hour or two online with it would get most novice users "up and running". This version is less tedious for those who are familiar with other operating systems, while it hasn't lost any clarity for novice users, and may have enhanced it. This book will be very valuable in getting new users "over the hump" when confronting UNIX for the first time. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993, 1994 BKLRNUNX.RVW 940325 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag