The second edition of this book is poorly edited. There are many spelling mistakes throughout the book, which is inexcusable as almost all of them can be caught by computer now. Semicolons and commas are incorrectly swapped on a regular basis. For a second edition textbook, I find it to be a poor example of educational writing.



The examples given are horribly inaccurate. For example, in section 8.5.1, "ls wc | w" is given as an example of composition-based reuse. On my computer, at least, this attempts to run ls on the file wc, and then pipes the output of that to the w command. What was intended is the still-inaccurate, "ls | wc -w", which counts the number of words in a directory. The correct command would be "ls | wc -l", which counts the number of files (each is printed on a separate line by ls).



All of these things would be forgivable, however, if the main text itself were interesting. Unfortunately, it instead reads like a first edition masters' thesis, complete with academic pretentiousness, sub-sub-subsections (i.e. 8.5.2.2), useless diagrams, and references [226] to other peoples' [10] master theses [153].