From Bash to Z Shell

07/08/2011 · No Responses

This comprehensive, hands-on guide focuses on two of the most popular and feature-rich shells, bash and zsh. From Bash to Z Shell: Conquering the Command Line is a book for all skill levels. Novices will receive an introduction to the features of shells and power users will get to explore the benefits of zsh—one of the most powerful, versatile shells ever written. Intermediate users will uncover hints, recipes, and ideas to enhance their skill sets.

The book covers shell programming, but is unique in its thorough coverage of using shells interactively—a powerful and time-saving alternative to Windows and a mouse. This strong author team has written an immediately useful book, packed with examples and suggestions that users of Unix, Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows can readily apply.

Some areas are covered in other books, but this one goes into some little-seen side streets and alleyways to show you the shortcuts to more efficient use of the shell. …The material here is invaluable: you’re not going to get it from the manual pages! I strongly recommend it.
–Ernest J.

This is a totally neat idea for a book… the command line gets addictive quickly.
–Bill Ryan, Bill’s House O Insomnia

About the Author
Oliver Kiddle is actively involved in the development of Zsh, and is an authority within the ZSH team on areas such as completion and parameters. Kiddle is a graduate of the Univesity of York.

Jerry Peek is a freelance writer and instructor who has used shells extensively, and taught users about them, for more than 20 years. Peek is the “Power Tools” columnist for Linux Magazine, and is the co-author of O’Reilly’s long-standing classic, “Unix Power Tools”.

Peter Stephenson grew up in the northeast of England and studied Physics at Oxford, ending up with a bachelor’s degree and a D.Phil. He spent nine years as a researcher in physics in Liverpool, Swansea, Berlin, and Pisa with a particular interest in computational physics. Since 2000, Stephenson has been a software engineer with Cambridge Silicon Radio, working on the baseband firmware for short range digital radio standards such as Bluetooth. Stephenson as been involved in the development of Zsh since the very early days back at the start of the 1990s when he started to write the FAQ. For the last few years, he’s served as coordinator of the shell’s development.