To date I haven't needed to bother with learning about Shell commands but more and more it seems necessary.

I'm looking for a "dummies" book to get started.
This SAMS "Shell Programming in 24 Hrs" looks easy ( I like the SAMS format) but the book was published 8 years ago.
Has the Shell world really changed much in 8 years?
Or is it save to buy it.
http://tinyurl.com/3a5xz3l

Has the Shell world really changed much in 8 years

Basically - No

Thanks Chris.

It sounds like you may be a little confused about the difference between MS DOS and the Windows Command Line. Windows NT/2000/XP/etc does not run on top of DOS. It does, however, have a DOS-like command line interface. But just to be clear, it's not DOS.
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fake sig spam removed

Who said anything about DOS?

We're talking Shell commands for a Linux server.

See here some commands line:

ADDUSERS Add or list users to/from a CSV file
ARP Address Resolution Protocol
ASSOC Change file extension associations•
ASSOCIAT One step file association
ATTRIB Change file attributes
BOOTCFG Edit Windows boot settings
BROWSTAT Get domain, browser and PDC info

if you want to get comfy with the CLI, I cannot recommend unix visual quickstart enough:

http://www.amazon.com/Unix-Linux-Vis...dp_ob_title_bk

"how do i list what items are in this directory?"
<example>
"oh..."

Of all the books i've read, still the best to date. And I can still read it and go "cool!" at some trick.