UNIX For Dummies Quick Reference
Starting with the UNIX shell and moving steadily deeper inside the UNIX environment, UNIX For Dummies Quick Reference, 4th Edition, cuts to the chase with clear, concise answers to all your UNIX questions. From the basics of entering commands, organizing files and directories, and determining which shell you're using, this valuable little reference book steers you in the right direction. More than 100 basic UNIX commands are alphabetically sorted for easy lookups, and advanced topics on X Windows managers, text editors, and online components are all just a few pages away.
Why bother with the hassles of sorting through thousands of pages of text when the answers you need are all right here, tucked inside a lay-flat binding that lets you keep your book open to the page you're reading. Could using a UNIX reference be any easier?
Since then, Margy (www.gurus.com/margy) has coauthored more than 20 computer books about the topics of the Internet, UNIX, WordPerfect, Microsoft Access, and (stab from the past) PC-File and Javelin, including The Internet For Dummies, 6th Edition, and WordPerfect 7 For Windows 95 For Dummies (all from IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.). She loves her husband, Jordan; her kids, Meg and Zac; gardening; chickens; reading; and anything to do with eating. Margy and her husband also run Great Tapes for Kids (www.greattapes.com) from their home in the middle of a cornfield near Middlebury, Vermont.
John R. Levine was a member of the same computer club Margy was in -- before high school students, or even high schools, had computers. He wrote his first program in 1967 on an IBM 1130 (a computer almost as fast as your modern digital wristwatch, only more difficult to use). He became an official system administrator of a networked computer at Yale in 1975 and has been working in the computer and network biz since 1977. He got his company on to Usenet (see Part IV) early enough that it appears in a 1982 Byte magazine article in a map of Usenet, which then was so small that the map fit on half a page.
He used to spend most of his time writing software, although now he mostly writes books (including UNIX For Dummies and Internet Secrets, both from IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.) because it's more fun and he can do so at home in the hamlet of Trumansburg, New York, where he holds the exalted rank of sewer commissioner and offers free samples to visitors and plays with his young daughter when he's supposed to be writing. He also does a fair amount of public speaking. (See www.iecc.com/johnl.) He holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University, but please don't hold that against him.