Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours is a tutorial aimed at making the UNIX and Linux user more effective and productive users of the operating system. It does this by showing them how to take control of their systems by harnessing the power of the shell. The vast majority of users utilize either the Korn shell or some variation of the Bourne shell. This book will cover both of these. It will begin with a more generalized tutorial of shell programming and then move into the specifics of each of the shells. It covers everything from managing input/output, creating and utilizing variables, to customizing their shell.
I can't imagine I finally finished reading this book. I intermittently spent more than 7 actual years reading this whole book. I was waiting for proper snipping-times to read (and I didn't have plenty of that as a full-time employee with many professional and social commitments). Today, I am celebrating finishing the last 24th hour of this book. Those were the most long and most enjoyable 24-hours in my life. This book is a treasure and it is the basic that taught me Linux as I know it today. I am very happy I finished it and I will absolutely go through every chapter again and will possibly solve the problems at the end of each chapter. I am now targeting to go behind sed and awk more deeply to practice and master them, and I hope that is not going to take me as much time as this beautiful book took me. Although this book has some advanced chapters, it has - especially at the beginning - very useful explanations that beginners find very useful. Beginners may skim this book and read only things that they feel they understand well. They can go back to skim again once they advance themselves by reading other sources and books.
The book is very uneven in material. Most chapters are very basic, but some of the shell scripts are hard to understand. There are so many better texts since this was published.