Bash And Shell Programming Books

Learning the Bash Shell, Third Edition By Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatt

This is another one of the great books from O'Reilly. While this is not a really a book for absolute beginners, it is clearly written and fairly complete.

A Practical Guide To Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming by Mark G. Sobel

Covers most of the common command line tools available on your Linux system. Makes a good suppliment to the system man pages by providing many helpful examples of common commands. This is a good book for becoming familiar with what the common command line tools are and what they are used for.

Linux Phrasebook by Scott Granneman

This handy, pocket-sized (well, if you have big pockets) book provides a quick reference to many common commands. See my review.

Linux Administration Handbook, Second Edition by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, and Trent R. Hein

A really good reference work covering all of the common issues in system administration. It provides in-depth coverage of a number of underlying technologies that you should know about. Read my review here.

Classic Shell Scripting by Arnold Robbins and Nelson H. F. Beebe

A good treatment of shell programming that covers the common classes of problems that you solve with the shell, particularly text processing. While rather densely written, it would make a good follow-up to my tutorials.

Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, 101 Scripts for Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix Systems by Dave Taylor

A "cookbook" style presentation of many useful scripts solving common system and web server administration problems. The scripts are a little lightweight for production use, but make good starting points for futher development on your own. Note that this book assumes that you already know a few things about Linux/Unix and the shell.

The AWK Programming Language by Alfred Aho, Brian Kernighan, and Peter Weinberger

AWK is a programming language that is often inserted into shell scripts. The syntax of AWK is very similar to the C programming language in which Linux/Unix and its utilities are written. Learning AWK will make you familiar with concepts that appear in many other programs. This book, written by the original authors of the language, is probably the finest programming book I have ever read. Filled with examples and clear explanations, this book will give you a taste for the power of this useful language. Note that this book is skinny and expensive, but I think it's well worth it.

Linux/Unix Shell Scripting Sites

Heiner's SHELLdorado

SHELLdorado is a shell scripting education site. It features tutorials on various scripting topics and a large collection of shell scripts and functions.

Bash Reference Manual

Bash Reference Manual from the GNU project. This is an on-line reference manual from the people who wrote bash: the Free Software Foundation.

Bash Guide for Beginners

The Bash Guide for Beginners is a detailed introductory guide to bash and bash scripting. Part of the Linux Documentation Project.

BashFaq

Bash Frequently Asked Questions is a useful list of hints and tips for bash user.

BashPitfalls

Bash Pitfalls shows common errors that bash users make. When bash dosen't do what you expect it to, check this list out.

Advanced Bash Scripting HOWTO

The Advanced Bash Scripting HOWTO is a detailed look at bash shell programming. A thoughtful treatment with lots of examples and exercises. A good companion piece for the LinuxCommand.org tutorials. Part of the Linux Documentation Project.

Bash Prompt HOWTO

The Bash Prompt HOWTO is a surprisingly interesting discussion of all the things you can make the prompt do. From the Linux Documentation Project.

Hard Core Linux Sites

Linux From Scratch

The Linux From Scratch tutorial will step you through the process of building a complete Linux system from source code.

"From Power Up To Bash Prompt" HOWTO

The From Power Up To Bash Prompt HOWTO tutorial builds a bare system, in a similar way to the "Linux From Scratch" tutorial, but it focuses more on just installing a bootable system instead of a complete system.

General Purpose Linux Sites

The Linux Documentation Project contains the most important documents for the Linux user. Be sure to check out the many HOWTOs and Guides.

LinuxQuestions.org hosts very active and useful forums for Linux users at all levels or expertise. A good place to ask questions and find answers.

Linux Weekly News is the mature voice of the Linux community. Excellent news coverage and thoughtful commentary. Cool penguin gallery too.

Linux Today lists breaking news events regarding Linux and the open source community.

slashdot.org is the world famous "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." news and discussion site.

freshmeat.net is a site devoted to the latest news on software releases. Updated daily, this site is a great place to find Linux applications.

Linux Magazines

Linux Journal is a good, fairly technical magazine for experienced Linux users. Worth subscribing to.

Linux Standards

Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard describes the standard layout of a Linux system. A good site to visit if you want to learn how and why Linux is organized the way it is.

Linux Standard Base

Linux Standard Base is a project devoted to developing a standard for Linux distributions.

Fighting For Your Freedom

The Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF is working to protect our fundamental rights regardless of technology, to educate the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology, and to act as a defender of those liberties.

Software Freedom Law Center

SFLC provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

Against Monopoly

Against Monopoly is a blog featuring writings by economists and game theorists opposing various "intelectual property" concepts. Be sure to read the free, downloadable book Against Intellectual Property by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine.

Recommended Stuff

CentOS is a freely available, community supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is a good distribution to use if you want to use Red Hat technology, but unlike Fedora it has longer release cycles. This makes it a good choice for production use.

EmperorLinux, Inc. sells brand-name laptop computers expertly pre-configured with Linux. I have purchased several systems from them and have been very pleased.

SmoothWall Express is an open source firewall distribution based on the GNU/Linux operating system. SmoothWall includes a hardened subset of the GNU/Linux operating system, so there is no separate OS to install. Designed for ease of use, SmoothWall is configured via a web-based GUI, and requires no knowledge of Linux to install or use.

Cygwin is a Linux-like envronment for that popular legacy OS. You can install this and start writing shell scripts even before you install Linux. It's handy for many file management tasks. I used it extensively to write large scripts on otherwise brain-dead computers. Try it. You'll like it.

Miro is a multi-platform video podcast feed aggregator. With it, you can watch thousands of channels of free Internet TV. I've written a brief review.