6 Excellent Free Books to Learn Bash

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

4. Bash Guide for Beginners by Machtelt Garrels

Everybody working on a UNIX or UNIX-like system who wants to make life easier on themselves, power users and sysadmins alike, can benefit from reading this book. Learn about Bash programming.

This is a practical guide which, while not always being too serious, tries to give real-life instead of theoretical examples.

This guide has been translated to Chinese and Ukrainian.

Explores:

• Bash scripts.
• Writing and debugging scripts.
• The bash environment: Shell initialization files, Variables, Quoting characters, Shell expansion, aliases.
• Regular expressions.
• sed stream editor.
• awk programming language.
• Conditional statements (if, if/then/else, if/then/elif/else, Nested if statements, Boolean operations).
• Writing interactive scripts.
• Repetitive tasks.
• Functions.
• Catching signals.

The book is released under an open source license.

Read the book

5. The Bash Guide by Maarten Billemont

The Bash Guide teaches both newcomers and long-time users the best, safest and most robust ways of writing powerful bash programming scripts as well as making efficient and speedy interactive use of the shell.

The book explores:

• Inception – an introduction to bash, installing and starting it; the terminal, the keyboard and the display; programs, processes and how their flow of information is connected.
• Commands and Arguments – what a command is, and how to issue them; interactive mode and scripts; command syntax, searching commands and programs by name; arguments and word splitting as well as input and output redirection.
• Variables and Expansions – Bash parameters and variables; environment variables, special parameters and array parameters; expanding parameters, expansion operators, command substitution and process substitution; pathname expansion, tilde expansion and brace expansion.
• Tests and Conditionals – exit codes, success and failure, testing files, strings and numbers, handling different conditions, conditional operators and conditional compound commands.

This guide is open source, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA). It’s a work-in-progress.

Read the book

6. Linux Shell Scripting Tutorial by Vivek Gite

The book starts by describing Linux and simple scripts to automate frequently executed commands and moves on to describing conditional logic, user interaction, loops, menus, traps, and functions. The book ends with various sys administration related scripts such as making a backup, using cron jobs, writing interactive tools, web based tools, remote login, ftp and database backup related scripts.

The book is aimed at system administrators and students. It teachers the reader how to read, write, and debug Linux shell scripts using the Bash shell.

Linux Shell Scripting Tutorial is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Read the book

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – GNU Bash Reference Manual and more books
Page 2 – Bash Guide for Beginners and more books

All books in this series: