For use with all versions of Linux, including Ubuntu,™ Fedora,™ openSUSE,™ Red Hat,® Debian, Mandriva, Mint, and now OS X, too!

To be truly productive with Linux, you need to thoroughly master shells and the command line. Until now, you had to buy two books to gain that mastery: a tutorial on fundamental Linux concepts and techniques, plus a separate reference. Now, there’s a far better solution. Renowned Linux expert Mark Sobell has brought together comprehensive, insightful guidance on the tools system administrators, developers, and power users need most, and an outstanding day-to-day reference, both in the same book.

This book is 100 percent distribution and release agnostic: You can use it with any Linux system, now and for years to come. Use Macs, too? This new edition adds comprehensive coverage of the Mac OS X command line, including essential OS X-only tools and utilities other Linux/UNIX books ignore.

Packed with hundreds of high-quality, realistic examples, this book gives you Linux from the ground up: the clearest explanations and most useful knowledge about everything from filesystems to shells, editors to utilities, and programming tools to regular expressions. Sobell has also added an outstanding new primer on Perl, the most important programming tool for Linux admins seeking to automate complex, time-consuming tasks.

A Practical Guide to Linux® Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming, Second Edition, is the only book to deliver

• Better, more realistic examples covering tasks you’ll actually need to perform
• Deeper insight, based on Sobell’s immense knowledge of every Linux and OS X nook and cranny
• A start-to-finish primer on Perl for every system administrator
• In-depth coverage of basic and advanced Linux shell programming with bash and tcsh
• Practical explanations of 100 core utilities, from aspell to xargs–including Mac OS X specific utilities from ditto to SetFile
• All-new coverage of automating remote backups with rsync
• Dozens of system security tips, including step-by-step walkthroughs of implementing secure communications using ssh and scp
• Tips and tricks for customizing the shell and using it interactively from the command line
• Complete guides to high-productivity editing with both vim and emacs
• A comprehensive, 286-page command reference section–now with revised and expanded indexes for faster access to the information you need
• Instructions for updating systems automatically with apt-get and yum
• Dozens of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence
• And much more, including coverage of BitTorrent, gawk, sed, find, sort, bzip2, and regular expressions

In this handy, compact guide, you’ll explore a ton of powerful Ubuntu Linux commands while you learn to use Ubuntu Linux as the experts do: from the command line. Try out more than 1,000 commands to find and get software, monitor system health and security, and access network resources. Then, apply the skills you learn from this book to use and administer desktops and servers running Ubuntu, Debian, and KNOPPIX or any other Linux distribution.

The Linux operating system has made a lot of progress in the past few years, and Running Linux has progressed right along with it to remain the single best general-purpose book for curious computer users who want to install, use, and enjoy Linux. The team of authors present a text that's simultaneously detailed and readable. Coupled with an inquisitive and capable reader, that's a recipe for success with the world's most popular open-source operating system. This new edition adds coverage of the GNOME desktop environment, the Apache/MySQL/PHP server suite, and the Postfix mail transfer daemon. It also covers core capabilities and behaviors of Linux through kernel version 2.4. There's better coverage of network security (including firewalling and ADSL link configuration), and coverage of how to set up audio-related hardware and software.

Perhaps best of all, this book conveys a sense of the "Linux attitude" as the authors see it. Linux, they say, is largely about experimentation, research, trial and error, and participation in a community. This comes in welcome contrast to books that focus on recipes (follow these steps to accomplish A; do these things to make your system do B). Though the authors of this book provide lots of how-to information, it's always presented with an eye toward further exploration. In explaining how to build the kernel, for example, the authors provide six concise steps as a reference, but then go on for several pages about designing makefiles and how to deal with error messages. This book's a treat. --David Wall

Topics covered: Assuming you know next to nothing about Linux, socially and historically as well as technically, this book teaches you what you need to know to make the operating system meet your desktop and server computing requirements. Coverage takes you from preparing to install Linux (in a multi-OS environment if you wish), continues through system administration and the most useful applications (like TeX and Internet clients), and proceeds to cover programming tools and server daemons (notably Apache, MySQL, and PHP). The coverage is mostly generic, but peculiarities of Red Hat, SuSE, and Debian get attention, too.

Unix Shell Programming is a tutorial aimed at helping Unix and Linux users get optimal performance out of their operating out of their operating system. It shows them how to take control of their systems and work efficiently by harnessing the power of the shell to solve common problems. The reader learns everything he or she needs to know to customize the way a Unix system responds.

The vast majority of Unix users utilize the Korn shell or some variant of the Bourne shell, such as bash. Three are covered in the third edition of Unix Shell Programming. It begins with a generalized tutorial of Unix and tools and then moves into detailed coverage of shell programming.

Topics covered include: regular expressions, the kernel and the utilities, command files, parameters, manipulating text filters, understanding and debugging shell scripts, creating and utilizing variables, tools, processes, and customizing the shell.

You may not have heard of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) or its professional certifications, but they're becoming an important part of proving professional competence in the Linux operating system. That aside, LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell is a fantastic introductory Linux book, well suited to introducing a curious newcomer to the environment and bringing an intermediate user up to expert status.

The book is organized around the LPI's published standards for two Level 1 exams (exams 101, which deals with key commands and file-system concepts, and 102, which places more emphasis on hardware, networking, and shell scripting). The organization works well even if you're not specifically preparing for either exam.

LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell assumes nothing in early chapters, going so far--to cite one example--as to walk readers through the concept of commands with parameters separately from the concept of commands alone. Later, the pace picks up, and strategic advice is substituted (such as how to partition a disk for maximum speed and reliability) for "type-this" instructions.

Throughout, the book makes effective use of O'Reilly's time-tested and remarkably clear format for presenting Unix commands and configuration files. Each chapter concludes with a series of exercises designed to help you discover behaviors on your own, and includes the practice questions you expect in a test-prep aid. --David Wall

Topics covered: The knowledge that's tested on the Linux Professional Institute's exams 101 and 102, which includes everything from basic Linux commands and concepts to installation of the operating system, essential network configuration, and kernel recompilation.