O'Reilly has brought out a third edition of Learning the Bash Shell, by Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatt. The book covers bash as a user interface, and as a scripting environment, and targets beginning and advanced users.

(Click for larger view of book cover)

O'Reilly calls the work “the definitive guide to bash,” noting that it covers basics such as command history, command-line editing, and command completion. It also covers bash's programming features, including flow control, signal handling, and command-line processing, and I/O.

The new edition covers new features of bash 3, yet is backwards-compatible with bash 1 and 2, O'Reilly says.

Meg Golding, of linuxchix.org, said of a previous edition, “I purchased 'Learning the bash Shell' in December of 2000. From the moment the book arrived till now, it has kept a place no further than arms-length from my computer. No other technical book can say the same.”

Availability

The 352-page book is available now, priced at $34.95 direct from O'Reilly. A sample chapter (PDF download) on basic shell scripting is also available.

 
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