Aima.43

Aima.43
net.general
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!houxi!floyd!cmcl2!esquire!ima!johnl
Wed Mar 10 17:50:15 1982
Book report
There are now two books on the market that are supposed to be readable
introductions to the UNIX system. These are:

"Using the Unix System" [Gauthier, Richard, (RLG), Reston Publishing]

This book appeared last summer. It starts off with an introduction
for the novice user and finishes with detailed instructions on system
management. It is full of typographical and factual errors. It is best
summed up by the review which appeared in the Nov. 1981 ACM Computing
Reviews:

"The UNIX Community has long awaited a book that tells how to use
UNIX ... With the publication of this book the UNIX community is
still looking."

"A User Guide to the UNIX System" [Thomas, R.A. and Yates, J.,
Osborne/McGraw Hill, $15.99]

This book was released in January and was on display at USENIX. It
is intended for the begining to novice computer user. It contains a
tutorial section, from login to grep. It is well laid out with lots of
good graphics. The last sections talk about applications such as Office
Automation. There is an 80 page section on UNIX System Resources, who
has what for UNIX.

I read the Yates and Thomas book and was unimpressed. The first
chapter which purports to explain where Unix comes from and what the
acronym stands for is a scream. It's not terribly accurate, though. It
suggests a grand corporate vision at Bell Labs rather than the rather
haphazard truth. "The system was christened the UNIX system, a reference
to the unified, team-programming environment it would serve." Jeez.

The second "what is a computer" chapter is adequate but suggests
that you can get an optical disk unit for $6,000 and that the only kind
of fast printer is a drum printer.

The tutorial and "reference" chapters are sort of OK, although I get
the distinct impression that the authors' understanding of Unix is far
less complete than they think it is. They seem to think that "a | b" is
a shell script and don't mention that you can put commands in a file and
make up new commands of your own, which is pretty important.

The fifth chapter on "office automation" is just silly and extremely
misleading. (It was excerpted in Computerworld a few weeks ago). They
make inane statements like "The Unix System supports office automation"
and completely fail to distinguish between what vanilla Unix does, what
various enhanced Unixes do, and what they think is just neat. For
example, on page 374 they refer to BBN's InfoMail but neglect to mention
that it does not now run on any Unix system and probably never will. On
page 381 they suggest that you can send a mail message to a photocopying
machine and make 500 copies of it, which some souped up Unixes may do but
Bell V7 and 3.0 do not. They talk about facsimile transmission, which
has nothing to do with Unix at all.

The "resources" chapter probably has the names and addresses right,
but the descriptions of who offers what are again garbled. It is only
here that they bother to mention that Bell doesn't support Unix. They
don't appear to know about uucp and Usenet, which I would think is quite
an important Unix resource.

So I would be forced to say that the Yates and Thomas book is better
than the other one, but that only the tutorial sections are worth
reading.

John Levine
decvax!{cca,yale-co}!ima!johnl
chico!esquire!ima!johnl

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