[CLUE-Talk] Intro to Unix book.

[Dave Anselmi]

Can anyone recommend a good book to introduce people to Unix?  I have
several friends and family who would like to learn, but aren't technical
(some can handle a command line, some are just point and click).

Books that have been valuable to me are "The UNIX Programming
Environment" by Kernighan and Pike, "Essential System Administration"
from O'Reilly, and "UNIX System Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth,
et. al.

The K & P book is really about shell programming but covers enough about
the system to get by.  But it's a programmer's book, and some beginners
just don't get that.

The Nemeth book is too advanced for beginners.  I found the O'Reilly
admin book to be a great intro to what was going on, but I haven't tried
it on any beginners.  For them I think it's a little long, and although
the material is very interesting and pertinent (to me), I suspect they
will be wondering "so how does this get my email read?"

Generally, I despise "for dummies" books, and the "record time" or "in
21 days" books that turn out to be full of screen shots of pointing and
clicking (isn't the gui supposed to make it obvious where to point and
click?  The thing you need out of the books that they lack is details of
how all the dialog box fields affect what actually happens.)

But I don't know.  I'm an engineer, so simple books annoy me.  But I
want to teach non-engineers, so I ask your advice.

Dave