While somewhat pricey, this book is a good way for a novice Sun workstation user to learn just what his or her new toy is capable of. It starts with the basics of UNIX, always with the Sun flavoring, and goes on to explain just about everything a new user needs to know to begin making effective use of his or her machine.

Chapter 1, “Logging into Your System,” covers login names, passwords, network logins, and the “root” login name. Chapter 2, “Basic File System,” discusses directories, files, and paths; listing directory contents; viewing files; and moving and removing files and directories. Chapter 3, “File Permissions,” addresses basic permissions; changing permissions, owners, and groups; and default permissions.

Chapter 4, “Manual Pages,” describes online man pages and MANPATH. Chapter 5, “Executing Commands,” includes command syntax; foreground and background processing; redirection and piping; and the command history list. Chapter 6, “Editors,” gives partial coverage of vi and presents the defaults editor and the “Textedit” tool.

Chapter 7, “Your Home Directory,” presents .cshrc, .login, .mailrc, .sunview, .defaults, and .rootmenu. Chapter 8, “SunView,” covers the basic screen, window operations, the SunView menu, and cutting/copying and pasting text. This chapter probably should appear much sooner; its concepts are used throughout the earlier chapters.

Chapter 9, “MailTool,” discusses sending and receiving mail and local versus remote mail. Chapter 10, “Networking,” includes the Network File System; Network Information Services (“Yellow Pages”); mounting; and rcp, rsh, finger, and related programs. Chapter 11, “Backing Up Your System,” describes dump and restore as well as the tar tape archive command.

Chapter 12, “Printing a File,” covers printing, checking the queue, and removing jobs from the queue. Chapter 13, “System Security, ” discusses special passwords, encryption, and locking the screen. Chapter 14, “Rebooting Your System,” covers different levels of reboot, when each is needed, and the effects of each.

The descriptions of the various features are quite good, but the examples that go with those discussions have many errors. Some of the errors are obviously just typos (such as omissions and reversals), but even simple typos can foul up a novice who is trying to use the examples as patterns for what to type at his or her computer.

On the whole, if you have the $35 to spare and need a quick and easy introduction to what a Sun is all about, this book is a pretty good way to get it. If the examples were correct, I would say it was a very good way to get that introduction, but no book that is specifically aimed at novices can be quite as lax as this one in its proofreading and still get an A. I give it a B+.