puder (03/14/83)
At several levels, Richard Gautier's UNIX book is lousy. Most importantly, it has several factual errors, which could have been cleared up easily if he had actually read the UNIX manual (see man(1)). The use of the English language was just plain bad. It is difficult to understand even where he is explaining simple things. It is obvious that the book was just thrown together, and was probably not even proofread. The acknowledgements section brags that the TEX/METAFONT system was used to typeset the book. Actually, the TEX sys- tem was _a_b_u_s_e_d to typeset the book. There are several places where the pointsize changes very slightly for no rea- son, which is visually irritating. The use of multiple fonts is not even as good as the on-line manual. The descriptions of dialog with the machine are labelled in the margin like this: uusseerr -> pwd<rr> UUNNIIXX -> /usr/dick UUNNIIXX -> $ uusseerr -> cd A/A.1 change to directory A.1 UUNNIIXX -> $ now positioned at A.1 rather than using one font for the computer and another for the user, so the arrangement of text could be left just as it would appear on a terminal. Beginners should not read this book. Experienced users should read only chapter 9 (system administration) and dis- trust any piece of factual information, since it is quite likely to be false (again, read the manual). His descrip- tions of the ncheck, dcheck and icheck commands are largely superseded by the fsck command, which does almost everything the others do, and can do the obvious fixes automatically. Karl Puder burdvax!puder SDC-aBC, R & D Paoli, Pa. (215)648-7555