UNIX Made Easy: The Basics & Beyond!

This large book, written by a long-time Unix consultant and his staff, can serve as a fine in-house training guide and reference tool. By interspersing how-to information and reference tables with brief quizzes and exercises, the authors of Unix Made Easy make it more likely that readers will retain information. System administrators might want to think about giving or loaning this book to all Unix newbies under their care.

The guide opens with a quick tour of Unix that includes logging in, exploring directory structures, creating files, and other basic jobs. Then, the authors explain vi using conceptual drawings that are superior for a computer book. Unfortunately, Unix Made Easydoesn't cover other editors as well, although it provides plenty of details on and excellent conceptual drawings of editing aids grep, sed, and awk.

The book's final chapters teach individual tasks, such as printing, using online help, and using Motif. In the section about using the Internet, the exercises (such as using FTP to get a list of mailing lists) make the last part of this book as much a guide to the global network as a guide to Unix. Unix Made Easy covers only two Web browsers--Mosaic and Lynx--before wrapping up with an appetite-whetting taste of C and Korn shell programming and environment modification.