Pro Bash programming

What Hacker News says

1. alsetmusicMar 2026
   I remember when I was coming up on the command line and I'd browse the forums at unix.com. Someone would ask how to do a thing and CFAJohnson would come in with a far less readable solution that was more performative (probably replacing calls to external tools with Bash internals, but I didn't know enough then to speak intelligently about it now).

   People would say, "Why use this when it's harder to read and only saves N ms?" He'd reply that you'd care about those ms when you had to read a database from 500 remote servers (I'm paraphrasing. He probably had a much better example.)

   Turns out, he wrote a book that I later purchased. It appears to have been taken over by a different author, but the first release was all him and I bought it immediately when I recognized the name / unix.com handle. Though it was over my head when I first bought it, I later learned enough to love it. I hope he's on HN and knows that someone loved his posts / book.

   https://www.amazon.com/Pro-Bash-Programming-Scripting-Expert...

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2. alsetmusicJun 2024
   I’ll throw out a recommendation for Pro Bash Programming as a great book for advanced scripting techniques. I just received my copy of the third edition (which is now simply Pro Bash). The original author and his co-author also wrote Shell Scripting Recipes. I bought the books because I recognized the original author from Unix.com forums, where he wrote about how his code would be more efficient than another example when deployed over N number of instances. I had no ability to verify at the time, but his confidence made me believe in the “Pro” title. It was way over my head until I became fairly proficient through other books. Definitely would recommend. No affiliation.
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3. marypublicJun 2017
   I found this useful for getting deeper with using bash: "Pro Bash Programming : Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell, Second Edition." It is kind of a brain dump type of book but it called out a bunch of little things I had missed in looking at other information sources.
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