----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 3:08
PM
Subject: RE: Programming languages that
make DBA's lives easier
If you are just learning Korn Shell programming, I'd recommend
The Korn Shell (3rd edition)
by
Anatole Olczak
it's better than others I have seen, but basic... you won't
get deep enough to make any huge programs, but it should be enough for you're
Oracle DBA needs.
-----Original Message-----
From:
Janardhana Babu Donga [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 2:29 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: RE: Programming languages that make DBA's lives easier
What are the good books you guys recommend for Shell
Programming? I have old
edition of UNIX shells by
example (by Ellie Quigley). I need to replace this
with some good book.
Do I need to learn perl before reading PERL for DBAs? If so,
what are the
good perl books do you guys recommend?
-- Babu
-----Original Message-----
Sent:
Tuesday, February 18, 2003 1:04 PM
To: Multiple
recipients of list ORACLE-L
I thought it might be worthwhile to say WHY I prefer ksh for
most scripting.
As one writer put it, use a language you know. I've used
ksh for years, so
that is certainly one big factor in
preferring it. But, that aside, if you
use
mostly the Bourne Shell syntax and stay away from the some of the Korn
Shell syntactical candy that doesn't do anything extra, then
your scripts
are very easy to read, and are mostly
self-documenting. For me, that is a
big
advantage.
If you use ksh, then you need to become reasonably proficient
with a few of
the more important utilities such as sed
and awk/nawk/gawk and become
familiar with good old
regular expressions (wonderful stuff!).
One area where ksh is weak is its inability to set up a
two-way socket with
a child process like
sqlplus. Perl can do this (for example, by using
IPC::Open2). With ksh, you can send to the child, and you can
receive from
the child, but you can't converse with
the child. Even with the coprocess
(which is a
pain to use), you still have one-way communication at any given
time. However, 99% of the time, ksh will work
fine. For that other 1% (OK,
maybe 2%), you
either figure out a workable compromise with ksh, or you use
perl.
If you want some reading material, my recommendation
is:
Unix System V: A Practical Guide
by
Mark G. Sobel
(There is also a version for BSD)
This is a outstanding overview of Unix including sh, ksh, and
csh
programming; as well as good introductions to sed,
awk, and regular
expressions. It also has
chapters on emacs and vi ("Remember, vi is your
friend."). Amazon has the 3rd edition listed with a publish date
of 1995.
So there probably is some rather outdated
info in the book on stuff like
gopher, archie,
possibly Mosaic (Oh heeeeey, cool!). Just ignore this. All
the other stuff is still completely relevant and presented in
what I think
is the perfect level of detail -- not too
verbose; not too terse -- with
good examples.
Eventually, to get seriously cooking with sed and awk, you
will need to get
something like the O'Reilly sed and
awk book. But, for ksh programming: If
you work
through the Bourne Shell and Korn Shell chapters of the Sobel book,
it is likely that this book is all you will ever need.
Another wonderful
thing about this book is that it
doesn't use the current trend of big fonts
with big
margins and thick paper to create a monster sized book. Instead,
you get lots of information in a book that takes up little
shelf space.
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--
Author: Janardhana Babu Donga
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