Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

The exact title is "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, 101 scripts of Linux, OS X and UNIX systems, 2nd Edition" by Dave Taylor and Brandon Perry from No Starch Press.

It's been a while since the first version of the book came out (2004) and a lot has changed in the world of UNIX since that time so though many of the ideas from the first version are still valid, it has been updated to take into account systems like macOS and even Windows.

The book is broken into the following sections

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 0: A Shell Scripts Crash Course
• Chapter 1: The Missing Code Library
• Chapter 2: Improving on User Commands
• Chapter 3: Creating Utilities
• Chapter 4: Tweaking Unix
• Chapter 5: System Administration: Managing Users
• Chapter 6: System Administration: System Maintenance
• Chapter 7: Web and Internet Users
• Chapter 8: Webmaster Hacks
• Chapter 9: Web and Internet Administration
• Chapter 10: Internet Server Administration
• Chapter 11: OS X Scripts
• Chapter 12: Shell Script Fun and Games
• Chapter 13: Working with the Cloud
• Chapter 14: ImageMagick and Working with Graphics Files
• Chapter 15: Days and Dates
• Appendix A: Installing Bash on Windows 10
• Appendix B: Bonus Scripts
• Index

It's a long book at 305 pages, and it's probably more of a reference book for ideas on shell scripting and what you can do rather than reading it from start to finish - though if you're new to the subject, it's probably worth reading Chapter 0 before moving to other chapters.

If you want to get more out of using the command line (on pretty much any UNIX like OS) this could be the book for you.

It's available for purchase direct from No Starch Press for $34.95 Print Book and FREE Ebook or $27.95 Ebook (PDF, Mobi, and ePub), slightly more through O'Reilly (but you can get it through their Safari service) and considerably cheaper through Amazon.

Natwest goes on Safari

It's taken a while, but it seems Natwest bank in the UK have changed their on-line banking system to recognise Apple's Safari browser. In the past, they would only recognise IE or Firefox (and variants).

Though Apple are still only a tiny percentage of the overall PC market, they do dominate in certain areas such as media, film etc and quite a lot of students too. Maybe their web stats have shown Apple users trying to access the site, or they've received complaints.

It's time all sites supported at least IE, Firefox and Safari (as well as others like Opera).

Apple to release Safari for Windows

Safari 3 has been released as a public beta for MacOS X and Windows. Safari 3 will come with Apple's MacOS X 10.5 known as Leopard.

Apple state Safari is siginificantly faster than other browsers on the Windows platform (2x IE7 and 1.6x Firefox v2), however Windows users may be slow to adopt Safari most people will use IE by default.

It does give developers (who don't use Macs) the opportunity to test their web pages on multiple browsers on Windows though, although that's a tiny market.

This seems more a dig at Microsoft than a real browser competitor.