Complex. From what I read, Shotts "The Linux Command Line" is a better introduction for beginners. http://linuxcommand.org/

PT. 1 - How the title compares to the contents

Title is bull. It only covers the Bash shell and the Z-shell.

Also, it barely covers the bash shell. Seems like what the authors really wanted to do was write a book on Z-shell, and compare how to do in Z-shell something you might normally do in bash shell. The bash shell was just there for contrast and ease of translation.

Seems like it's mainly about Z-shell. The only reason they threw 'bash' shell on the cover was to grab the attention of unwitting book purchasers. That's a mistake, because the audience this book is written for is the high-knowledge people who already know bash and can translate that knowledge into z-shell ability, not the people who are cluelessly wandering the aisles of a book store wanting to learn "this new bash shell thingy."

Title was a stupid, stupid, stupid mistake. Should have been "Learn the z-shell (and some tricks you didn't know about the bash shell)" or something like that.

PT. 2 - The structure of the book

The book itself is terribly structured. There seems to be no sort of rhyme or reason as to organizing their knowledge or putting things where they can easily be found. They have a large chapter on customizing text completion (we all know how absolutely important and necessary that is when writing a shell script, or in everyday shell use), but the basics needed to get started on the z-shell are spread out over a dozen chapters.

It's almost as if "From Bash to Z-shell" was designed as a reference book, but it certainly isn't a reference book: The book calls itself a tutorial, and the writing is long-winded, rambling, and unnecessary. You only get any actual shell command or output two or three times a page. This is no reference book

Sections of each chapter are only shown in the table of contents, so you will find yourself flipping back to that way more than you'd like. The reading feel less like a systematic explanation of knowledge, and more a trivia book or a badly written political sciences textbook: there's so much worthless junk and fat in there which needs to be cut out.

PT. 3 - Writing style

The verbose swathes of text itself sound like they were written by a robot, and are mostly technical. If you don't like reading source code for fun, you will likely find yourself struggling to plough through the next few aimless paragraphs, in which the authors inevidibly talk about whatever the hell they feel like.

I often found myself wishing they hadn't tried to document every single different behavior of each and every aspect of the z-shell. All you need to say is "To do X, type in Y. Here are some parameters you can use with Y." Instead, the authors opted for "Let's explain in a page of wordy paragraphs what could be expressed in two or three bullet points".

Basically, the writing itself is mechanical, but so unnecessarily verbose as to remove any value from the mechanistic nature - it just becomes a long, pointless, bad explanation.

PT. 4 - Conclusion

In the end, I think the problem with this book is the authors just did not know what they wanted to write. The one thing they did know was that they wanted to write about the Z-shell.

They also wanted to write about the bash shell, but they weren't sure whether they wanted to use it solely as a comparison and a stepping stone for bash users to Z-shell, or as a teaching experience in itself, so they went for a painful compromise that leaves everyone unsatisfied.

They couldn't decide what they wanted the purpose of their book to be. A tutorial for shell newbies? A tutorial for shell-programmers-to-be? A tutorial for sysadmins who will be using the shell every day?

Or maybe they didn't want it to be a tutorial, maybe they wanted it to be a reference book. No, wait, tutorial. No, wait, maybe neither, maybe we want to write a complete documentation of the z-shell (this is what the book ended up like... one, huge, overweight, 50x-bigger-than-it-needs-to-be version of the bash manual page, with way too much explanation in between.) No, wait, tutorial again. Better lengthen our explanations so the people who have never used a shell before can get it.

The authors just didn't know they wanted this book to be. It can't be everything to everyone, but they tried doing that and fucked it up miserably.

Too sloppy and verbose for a reference.

It's too sloppy, aimless, and verbose to be documentation.

It's too mechanical, and it's designed too much like a reference book to be a tutorial.

The authors call it 'technical material,' but it's really not. Technical material is terser than that. The authors would do well to sit down and decide whether the book is for those new to shells, or for already technically versed users trying to learn z-shell, or for z-shell users trying to master the language. If it's one of the latter two, they need to decide whether it's intended to be more step-by-step and human-voiced like a tutorial, or more organized and pithy like a reference should be.

After that they need to rewrite the entire goddamned book - because what they have right now is crap. You can spend hours plugging through this, learning all sorts of useless shell behavioral details you will never use (and god knows you can't skip over it because if you're new, you have no idea what's important), and barely covering the important commands. That's what I did, and they wasted eight hours of my life. Ugh... such a terrible book. Not a hall of famer when it comes to bad technical writing, but certainly an honorable mention. ( )