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Ed Mastery: The Standard Unix Text Editor
Let me be perfectly clear: ed(1) is the standard Unix text editor. If you don’t know ed, you’re not a sysadmin. You're a mere dabbler. A dilettante. Deficient.
Forty years after ed’s introduction, internationally acclaimed author Michael W Lucas has finally unlocked the mysteries of ed for everyone. With Ed Mastery, you too can become a proper sysadmin.
Ed Mastery will help you:
• understand buffers and addresses
• insert, remove, and mangle text
• master file management and shell escapes
• comprehend regular expressions, searches, and substitutions
• create high-performance scripts for transforming files
You must be at least this competent to use this computer. Read Ed Mastery today!
Forty years after ed’s introduction, internationally acclaimed author Michael W Lucas has finally unlocked the mysteries of ed for everyone. With Ed Mastery, you too can become a proper sysadmin.
Ed Mastery will help you:
• understand buffers and addresses
• insert, remove, and mangle text
• master file management and shell escapes
• comprehend regular expressions, searches, and substitutions
• create high-performance scripts for transforming files
You must be at least this competent to use this computer. Read Ed Mastery today!
- GenresTechnology
104 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 31, 2018
18 people are currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Michael W. Lucas
48 books77 followersMichael W. Lucas is the author of fifty-odd critically-acclaimed nonfiction books. As Michael Warren Lucas, he's written several novels.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 24, 2021
April fools joke or not, this book is seriously useful. Even though I will likely never use ed(1) directly on purpose, I'm now comfortable enough to get by. More importantly, I discovered a lot of the underlying logic behind vim's Ex mode, g/re/p, and sed that weren't as intuitive before. Michael's tone and humor kept what could have been a very boring topic wildly engaging. I was sharing snippets with people all throughout my read and even went back to give the regex section a second pass.
If this book has come across your path, do yourself a favor and pick it up. It's worth every penny.
If this book has come across your path, do yourself a favor and pick it up. It's worth every penny.
August 10, 2018
Ed Mastery is the sort of book that restores your faith in humanity.
Michael W. Lucas was about to write his 13th IT Mastery book. 13 is his lucky number so he decided that it needed to be special. He carefully crafted a plan.That plan was to release the 13th book on April 1st (April Fool's Day). The book would be sponsored by folks who had no idea what they were getting. They weren't told the topic, the title, or anything about the book. They relied on their blind faith that MWL would give them a book worth reading.
Their faith was not in vain.
Ed Mastery is the sort of book that lets you know straightaway that it's tongue-in-cheek. It refers to Ed as the standard UNIX text editor and pokes fun at those of us using "glass teletypes" to enter in our code.
But where Ed Mastery really shines is that it's a damn good book. What sets this book apart is that it not only teaches you Ed but also teaches where some of the arcane bits of UNIX come from. Ed Mastery explains things like Ed's regex syntax (which vi and other programs borrow). It points out that grep is really g/re/p in Ed, and shows where the keystrokes for editors like vi had their beginnings. While learning Ed you also learn foundational concepts of UNIX. More than once I exclaimed "That's where that came from!" at the pages of this book.
What also makes this a masterful book that it has multiple layers of humor in it. The preface speaks of two versions of the book (The standard version and the "Manly Mc. Manface version" in terms that I will best leave to MWL's own writing.
Ed Mastery is the best sort of book from an age where computer books had humor, intelligence, and witticisms to keep you reading and learning. Even if you only use nano and gedit as your editors you'd be well-served picking up this book. It's one of the best computing books I've ever read.
Michael W. Lucas was about to write his 13th IT Mastery book. 13 is his lucky number so he decided that it needed to be special. He carefully crafted a plan.That plan was to release the 13th book on April 1st (April Fool's Day). The book would be sponsored by folks who had no idea what they were getting. They weren't told the topic, the title, or anything about the book. They relied on their blind faith that MWL would give them a book worth reading.
Their faith was not in vain.
Ed Mastery is the sort of book that lets you know straightaway that it's tongue-in-cheek. It refers to Ed as the standard UNIX text editor and pokes fun at those of us using "glass teletypes" to enter in our code.
But where Ed Mastery really shines is that it's a damn good book. What sets this book apart is that it not only teaches you Ed but also teaches where some of the arcane bits of UNIX come from. Ed Mastery explains things like Ed's regex syntax (which vi and other programs borrow). It points out that grep is really g/re/p in Ed, and shows where the keystrokes for editors like vi had their beginnings. While learning Ed you also learn foundational concepts of UNIX. More than once I exclaimed "That's where that came from!" at the pages of this book.
What also makes this a masterful book that it has multiple layers of humor in it. The preface speaks of two versions of the book (The standard version and the "Manly Mc. Manface version" in terms that I will best leave to MWL's own writing.
Ed Mastery is the best sort of book from an age where computer books had humor, intelligence, and witticisms to keep you reading and learning. Even if you only use nano and gedit as your editors you'd be well-served picking up this book. It's one of the best computing books I've ever read.
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June 26, 2021Written as a joke, it is a nice manual to ed, very minimalistic, very standard and very hard-to-use-in-202x. It is quite nice to understand the roots of vim commands or primitive regexps when dealing with printer-only output. But it is a joke, and not really funny one. You may proceed without this one, and live and prosper.
July 21, 2018
This is the first book which I read from Michael Lucas. If you want to learn ed or have problems with regular expressions you should read it.
June 9, 2021
It was fun, but of course not something I really recommend you spend time on. But I had fun.
October 16, 2021
Absolutely brilliant!
A must have for those wanting to become real sysadmins.
A must have for those wanting to become real sysadmins.
October 1, 2022
This is a delightful little book, and taught me much more about my vim (yes, vim), and computing history. Recommended reading, and it's tiny! Who knew line-oriented editing would be so much fun!
January 13, 2023
Not modal, not modeless; not GUI, not TUI; not vim, not emacs; just the file. That is the UNIX way. Use ed; commune with the patriarchs Ritchie and Thompson. That is the unix way.
wq
wq
September 18, 2025
Tongue-in-cheek walkthrough of the old teletype editor. Equal parts history, comedy and instruction.
October 8, 2021
The most amazing book ever
I really really liked this book and hope to read it again. My only complaint was that it was not longer. I would like to see more included on em, ex, vi, vim, sed and awk, bash, tmux, and byobu. I would like to see a list of at least 1,168 common shortcuts and would like to listen to it as an audiobook.
It might not seem worth it, but it is at least as good as Song of Achilles, and you all know *that* was good, right? Anyways, you might like this book even if you didn't like that one.
If you like obscure editors, you will love this book.
I really really liked this book and hope to read it again. My only complaint was that it was not longer. I would like to see more included on em, ex, vi, vim, sed and awk, bash, tmux, and byobu. I would like to see a list of at least 1,168 common shortcuts and would like to listen to it as an audiobook.
It might not seem worth it, but it is at least as good as Song of Achilles, and you all know *that* was good, right? Anyways, you might like this book even if you didn't like that one.
If you like obscure editors, you will love this book.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews