What are good Linux/Unix books for an advancing us

Question

Are there any good books for a relatively new but not totally new *nix user to get a bit more in depth knowledge (so no "Linux for dummies")? For the most part, I'm not looking for something to read through from start to finish. Rather, I'd rather have something that I can pick up and read in chunks when I need to know how to do something or whenever I have one of those "how do I do that again?" moments. Some areas that I'd like to see are:

• command line administration
• bash scripting
• programming (although I'd like something that isn't just relevant for C programmers)

I'd like this to be as platform-independent as possible (meaning it has info that's relevant for any linux distro as well as BSD, Solaris, OS X, etc), but the unix systems that I use the most are OS X and Debian/Ubuntu. So if I would benefit the most from having a more platform-dependent book, those are the platforms to target.

If I can get all this in one book, great, but I'd rather have a bit more in-depth material than coverage of everything. So if there are any books that cover just one of these areas, post it. Hell, post it even if it's not relevant to any of those areas and you think it's something that a person in my position should know about.

Answer 1

• sed & awk Dougherty and robbins
• Mastering regular expression Jeffrey Friedl
• Linux in a nutshell to look things up, although most of the info is also in manpages
• Vim by Steve Oualline

Answer 2

I can suggest the bunch of books here:

http://www.linux.org/docs/online_books.html

good luck;)

Answer 3

The O'Reilly books have excellent *nix coverage. I have these:

Learning the bash Shell
* Covers several basic *nix command line tools as well as more advanced shell scripting techniques.

Learning the vi and Vim Editors
* Priceless. Gave me the ability to very quickly edit or create shell scripts, configuration files, Python scripts from the shell.

Answer 4

I recommend the Armadillo book from O'Reilly for command line administration and shell scripting.

Answer 5

The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide is the only book that really allows the reader to grok bash scripting. You need that ability to fully understand how to start/stop daemons and to automate a lot of tasks.

Answer 6

The aforementioned Unix Power Tools is a must. Other classics are sed&awk and Mastering Regular Expressions. I also like some books from the O'Reilly "Cookbook" series:

• Bash Cookbook by Albing et al.
• Linux Cookbook by Carla Schroder
• Linux Networking Cookbook by Carla Schroder