Peek, Jerry; O'Reilly, Tim; Loukides, Mike; and other contributors. (1993). UNIX power tools. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., and New York: Bantam Books. ISBN: 0-533-35402-7 (pbk). 1119 + xlii pages. COST: $59.95. AVAILABLE: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 103A Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472. Phone: (800) 998-9938 or (707) 829-0515 Fax: (707) 829-0104 E-Mail: {Can order via e-mail} oar.com UNIX Power Tools is not for the timid: it's for people who want to empower themselves to be more capable UNIX users. The book is extensively cross indexed and intended for non-linear reading, to the point of "hypertext." The chapters are short and well organized. As stated in an opening section on "How to Use This Book," the 1100+ pages are meant to be taken in bite-sized chunks, to be browsed. Some prior knowledge of UNIX is expected, but the opening chapters, if read carefully, will bring a beginning user to a fair level of competence rapidly. The authors have done an excellent job of sequencing early material so that people with limited knowledge will not need to read ahead in the book to understand the chapter they are in. Later chapters are easily navigated by cross references to numbered sections of the text, so that the reader can quickly gather prerequisite background knowledge. The links in the text also point outside of the book proper, to programs stored on a compact disc (included). The disc, created by Ready-to-Run Software, includes about 173 programs of varying complexity mentioned in the book. (More on the CD later). The book has 56 chapters, divided into 9 sections, each with 10- 30 topical articles. The book is organized somewhat like an encyclopedia or thesaurus, with numeric and textual running headers and footers which make it easy to find any particular section. The index is quite good, but the Table of Contents and embedded links between book sections are probably all the navigation tools readers will need most of the time. Unlike most multi-author books (with encyclopedias being an important exception) individual author credits are given in each article. What's in this book? Lots and lots! The book is an assembly of short "articles" (chapter sections) written by the primary authors, a collection of other O'Reilly authors, and dozens of network personalities notable for their UNIX expertise. The authors include at least 15 years of network lore from Usenet, O'Reilly's Nutshell book series, and other sources. Fifty-six chapter titles are too long to list, but the 9 section headings indicate the richness of the content: o Section 1: Making Yourself at Home. This includes the basics of UNIX with many tips from experienced users. o Section 2: Let the Computer do the Dirty Work. (Mostly) simple methods for single-line or single-command methods for having UNIX carry out complicated functions. These include command line editing, job control, input and output redirection, and many other topics. o Section 3: Working with the Filesystem. Exhaustive description of how the UNIX filesystem works with many tips and bits of arcane knowledge to make using files easier. This section includes a whole section which de-mystifies the UNIX "find" command. o Section 4: Looking Inside Files. How to view, compare, spell check, and search files. Also a chapter on regular expressions, which must be understood prior to becoming a power user. o Section 5: Text Editing. vi, Emacs, awk, and Perl are highlights of this section. It also includes sed, ed, ex, and a collection of other text processing tools that are not quite text editors. There is no religious adherence to a particular editor here: power users choose the tool which best meets the need at hand! If you already know how to edit and are familiar with Emacs, skip directly to article 33.14 which tells you how to get Eliza, the automatic psychotherapist, to try to help Zippy the Pinhead. o Section 6: Managing Processes. UNIX process management capabilities are part of what makes it so powerful. o Section 7: Terminals and Printing. To get beyond the basics, or to set up your own environment, requires more background knowledge than you probably realize. o Section 8: Shell Programming. The authors wisely included separate chapters for the "initiated" and "uninitiated." This section introduces the powerful programming capabilities of the Unix shells. o Section 9: Miscellaneous. About what you would expect, except that the chapter on online help and the "man" command might have been better placed in Section 1. The text of the book is excellent: there are numerous examples, a just-right shortage of jargon, and an easy style. The physical page layout is exemplary: the headers, footers, two colors, and judicious use of boldface, italic, and fixed-width fonts all add to the readability and navigability of the text. Marginal icons or text indicate cross references or links to programs on the CD. Iconic bombs and screws warn the reader of possible mishaps. Enough samples for commands are given to get the point across, but lengthy usage samples are avoided (instead, more examples may be found on the CD). A few words on the CD are in order. Simply, this is a great idea. The links in the book point to a variety of standard Power Tools on the disc, as well as numerous helpful extensions and utilities contributed by the authors. The tools are pre-compiled for popular UNIX platforms: Sun3 and Sun4, HP, RS6000, SCO UNIX and Xenix, and DECstation. System administration skills are useful for accessing these, and system administrator's privileges are required to install some of them. If you do not have one of the platforms for which the software is pre-compiled, you should still be able to use the software on the CD. However, the programs on the CD are not stored using the standard UNIX power tools (e.g., "make" and "tar"), and the tools supplied for extracting the data did not work as well as they should have on non-supported platforms. I had difficulty installing the software on the CD on my Silicon Graphics workstation running System V UNIX, and on larger Convex, Sequent, and Cray computers. With books such as Krol's (1992) The Whole Internet selling by the tens of thousands, it is strange that UNIX Power Tools does not include any reference I could find to the free public domain anonymous FTP sites on the Internet which carry most of the software on the disc. Given the unusual format in which the data are stored on the CD, it would be useful for those with non-supported platforms to be told where they could download the source code for the same software in a standard form for free. Tne last comment on the CD: It would be useful to include a copy of the book index and Table of Contents, or perhaps even a small database of links in the text, to facilitate using the text. I was pleased to find that the gopher/ftp site at gopher.ora.com and ftp.ora.com (both 140.186.65.25 at the time of publication) do include an etext of the Table of Contents, errata for the CD (a few packages were missing from the first printing), and the file ftp.ora.com:pub/power_tools/unix/upt.mar93.tar.Z which contains source code for all of the shell scripts and other non-compiled UNIX programs found in the book. This file was much easier for me to install than the same items found on the CD. The more complicated programs, such as Emacs, grep, awk, and compress, would certainly be easier to install from the CD -- those require fairly extensive system administration skills just to configure prior to compiling when obtained in "raw" form from an FTP site. For those for whom it works, the CD surely offers a good value-added service. UNIX Power Tools was written with a fairly diverse audience in mind. Not every UNIX user has the time or the inclination to memorize the megabytes of arcane knowledge required for ascension to "Guru-hood." This book can serve those users as an extension to their own (volatile) memory, providing rapid look-up capabilities for seldom-used items. The book also offers tutorials to the new user, especially at the start of the book. It is unclear whether the $59.95 pricetag will attract many new users, but the text for new users is comparable to many other introductory UNIX texts. Power users and fans of (often important) trivia will be thrilled by the incredible collection of "Power Tools," which, with study, may be added to your UNIX arsenal. If you are like me, the people I teach, and most of the people I know, you learned UNIX (or are trying to learn UNIX) from experts. The richness of UNIX is also its drawback. There is so much you can do that figuring out a path to what you would like to do is seldom a task involving only one or two simple commands or utilities. UNIX Power Tools gives you access to some of the best experts, who explain themselves in a level of detail which is just right -- with pointers to sources for additional information. References Krol, Ed. (1992). The whole Internet: User's guide & catalog. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates. 376 pps. ISBN: 1-56592-025-2. Available: O'Reilly & Associates , 103 Morris Street, Suite A, Sebastopol, CA 95472 - 9902. Phone: (800) 998-9938 (707) 829-0515. $24.95. Reviewed by: Gregory B. Newby , Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 410 David Kinley Hall, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801. Phone: (217) 333-3280.