Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion Book Review

This was a perfect size book for what I needed. What I needed was a book that would get me back up to speed quickly on UNIX. I have not used UNIX since the late 80's, and I have not used Mac since the early 90's. The book starts off with a nice introduction to you Unix and why you would want to use it. The second chapter using the Terminal, is a nice introduction to Terminal's capabilities and shows you how to customization. After the first two chapters the book starts digging into the details of what you can do with Unix on the Mac. I have listed the chapters below. 1. Why Use Unix? 2. Using the Terminal 3. Exploring the Filesystem 4. File Management 5. Finding Files and Information 6. Redirecting I/O 7. Multitasking 8. Taking Unix Online 9. Of Windows and X11 10. Where to Go from Here As you can see from the chapter names the author covers some of the most important topics you need to know with a chapter dedicate to each. The only chapter that is not completely clear on what it covers is Taking Unix Online. That chapter digs into remote login, web access, and FTP. Although the book talks about using the code samples that come with the book, I could not find any online. That did not take anything away from the book. The samples are short enough to be able to type them yourself. I found that I wanted to read this book with my Mac turned on to try the different samples that the author covered. The author has a great writing style that makes the book an easy read. I have some other UNIX books where that is not true. Overall I think this is a great book for getting up to speed with UNIX quickly. This book along with my Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide have covered everything that I had to look up to date.

Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion: Using Unix and Linux Tools at the Command Line