Writing shell scripts is no longer an arcane art, practiced only by hardcore system administrators. The growing community of GNU/Linux will benefit from learning to write scripts that enhance productivity considerably. It is very hard for any book to simultaneously address the needs of both system administrators and average users. Any book that attempts to do this is, inevitably, either an exhaustive reference manual or simply a collection of toy examples.

These contradictory pulls affect the organization and contents of this book, as well. Ostensibly addressed to novices who wish to become professionals, this book focuses on “portability” of scripts across various versions of Unix; it requires some familiarity with the idiosyncratic quirks of different Unix shells. In order to introduce meaningful examples later, the book goes into a reasonably detailed treatment of regular expressions, as early as the second chapter. This may be daunting for beginners who don’t understand the motivation and haven’t seen illustrative examples.

However, for a novice user with the patience to take several passes at the book, initially skipping the technical details and coming back to them after grasping the essentials, this book offers many valuable insights. In particular, chapters 9 and 10 bring all the ideas together, addressing how to design good scripts by offering, with great clarity, the distilled essence of Seebach’s many years of experience in crafting portable scripts.

While there is no running theme in the examples strewn throughout the book, most of them are well chosen and interesting. Unfortunately, this book lacks exercises that ask the user to extend these examples.