bash Pocket Reference (Pocket Reference (O'Reilly)) at Dominant Systems Book Store

It's simple: you need to know how to work with the bash shell if you want to get to the heart of Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix systems. Updated for the most recent version of bash, this concise little book puts all of the essential information about bash at your fingertips. You'll quickly find answers to annoying questions that always come up when you're writing shell scripts -- What characters do you need to quote? How do you get variable substitution to do exactly what you want? How do you use arrays? -- and much more.

If you're a user or programmer of any Unix variant, or if you're using bash on Windows, you'll find this pocket reference indispensable. This book covers:

Invoking the Shell
Syntax
Functions
Variables
Arithmetic Expressions
Command History
Programmable Completion
Job Control
Shell Options
Command Execution
Coprocesses
Restricted Shells
Built-in Commands

Customer Reviews & Comments
As the copy on the back of this book claims, the O'Reilly 'Bash Pocket Reference' allows one to "quickly find answers to the annoying questions that always come up when you're writing shell scripts." As you would expect, this is a reference manual, and unless you already know the fundamentals of BASH, it won't be of much use, unless used in conjunction with another, more expansive book. My favorite part of this book so far has been its treatment of more obscure shell variables, and its quick reference for shell builtins. I should point out, though (and this is something that a previous reviewer seems to have missed), that this guide does *not* cover the use/syntax of all the external programs one might find on a *NIX system (e.g., grep, find, etc.). The reference is to BASH only and its associated builtin commands. And to be honest, external commands don't really *need* a reference like this, since they should already have man-pages that explain their usage. Considering the price and the abundance of information, the BASH pocket reference is a great buy for anyone who does even casual work in the BASH shell.

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