Introductory articles on UNIX tools (was Re: vi or emacs ?)

[Martin Weitzel]

In article <DE53846xds13 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>> Before turning anyone loose in vi, however,
>> I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you make sure they purchase and are reading the
>> book on the vi editor from O'Reilly & Associates. I was mostly lost and
>> frustrated with vi until I bought this book and read it.

Not the only good reference, but surely a good one. For to start with
"vi" the book "Exploring the UNIX System" by Kochan & Wood also has a
nice chapter.

>I'd also like to recommend the original "vi" user guide, a short paper by
>Bill Joy entitled "An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi". Unfortunately,
>this is not included in the System V docs. Too Berkeley-esque, I guess. Too
>bad.

That's the problem. Good introductory articles were often written
by those who wrote the first versions of the programs, but all the
goodies that did not carry the label "REFERENCE" often were *excluded*
later from the documentation by many UNIX vendors.

Those of us who still have old documentation (eg the famous UPM -
UNIX Programmers Manual of V7) should keep an eye on it. If someone
would ask me about how to start with "awk", "sed", "lex", "yacc", ...
(in general: everything that existed allready in V7) the tutorials
in the UPM are good place to point first.

(The two issues of the BSTJ - "Bell systems technical Journal" that were
mostly about UNIX, from July/August 1978 and October 1984, also contains
useful stuff, though it's more an overview.)
-- 
Martin Weitzel, email: martin at mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83