Vickery’s Books

UNIX Shell Programmer’s Interactive Workbook was a workbook for people who want to learn KornShell programming. It is part of a series of workbooks published by Prentice Hall that are all structured similarly: Each chapter consists of one or more labs, each lab consists of a set of exercises, and each exercise is structured as a series of questions. Most of the expository material is embedded in the answers to the exercises. The idea is for the reader to learn the material by doing the exercises as they go through the book. It’s not my idea of good pedagogy, but the folks at Prentice Hall seem to have had success with the format, and they have continued to publish more books in the series. There is a companion web site at http://www.phptr.com/phptrinteractive that includes answers to the end-of-chapter problems and additional instructional material.

On an historical note, there was a really stupid typographical error in the Preface of book that listed this web site’s URL as baggage.cs.qc.edu instead of babbage.cs.qc.edu. We had to dummy up a DNS alias for a while so that anyone going to "baggage" would get to "babbage." If you are trying to use the book, tried the link given in the book, and finally found this site only by dint of a Google search, you have my apologies.

Click here for the current list of known errors in the book. Please send me any addional ones that you find using this link. (Omit ".spam" from the address.)

Real-Time and Systems Programming for PCs was a book on the iRMX operating system. There is a Web page with a list of typographical errors. I still have the source code files for the examples in the book; send me email if you need them.