Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly & Mike Loukides
Unix Power Tools, Second Edition
O'Reilly & Associates, 1997. ISBN 1-56592-260-3. Pp. 1120 , $59.95. Includes CD-ROM.

Reviewed by Reginald Beardsley
<rhb@acm.org>

The second edition of Unix Power Tools reminds me of a once popular witticism about ALGOL: the first version was a distinct improvement upon its successors.

Some of the differences between the first and second editions:

• The section on password security has been deleted.

• The section on Awk has been substantially abbreviated and is now part of the section on batch editing. No mention is made of the availability of "the one true Awk" from Brian Kernighan's home page.

• Short scripts included in the text of the first edition must now be retrieved from the CD-ROM (e.g., logerrs, at the end of the section on redirecting I/O).

• A page listing the significant changes to Perl w/release 5.0 has been added. (I mention this because the publisher's blurb cited the importance of Perl as justification for abbreviating the treatment of Awk.)

• Highlighting of key words is now done by printing in medium gray rather than blue. Key words in sidebars are now printed in medium gray text on a light gray background!

• bash and tcsh have subsections of their own.

There are undoubtedly some other changes I didn't notice. It is, after all, still more than 1,000 pages. However, several hours spent paging through both editions side by side revealed little change in the content. In some instances, it appeared that sections, such as the discussion of hard and soft links, had been substantially rewritten. Closer examination showed that the changes were really just improved paragraph headings.

The deletion of content and the change from two-color printing to one color suggest to me that reducing production costs was the real focus of the second edition. Otherwise, updating the CD-ROM would have been sufficient.

Normally, I give away my old copy when I get a new edition of a book; shelf space is just too dear for me to keep two copies. In this case, I gave away the new edition and kept the first.