"Working Knowledge of UNIX, VMS, OS/400, VM/CMS, and MVS."
Wouldn't that look great on your resume?
One book can put it there: The Operating Systems Handbook. (I wanted to call it "Fake Your Way Through Minis and Mainframes," but McGraw-Hill wanted something that sounded more respectable.)
June 15, 2001 Formerly a $49.50 hardcover from McGraw-Hill; now a set of Acrobat files free for you to download! See below.
January 30, 2006 If you really want to buy a bound hardcopy version, you can now do so for a lot less than the McGraw-Hill version, thanks to the folks at lulu.com. Buy the complete book for $19.98 or just the MVS part for $9.98. More below. (You can also buy used copies of the original on Amazon for as little as 1 cent plus shipping and handling.)
"Great job! it saved me tens of hours scanning the perversely written mvs documentation! thanks for making it available!" Guillermo Alvarez, Ph.D., Research Staff Member, Storage Systems, IBM Almaden Research Center, June 2005
"After due study of The Operating Systems Handbook, you can name your salary floor." Stan Kelley-Bootle, UNIX Review, June 1996
![[book cover]](http://www.snee.com/bob/img/opsys.jpg)
This book shows you the following, for all five operating systems:
- History of the operating system
- Starting and ending a session
- Filenames
- How files are organized, and how to navigate
- Available on-line help
- Creating, copying, renaming, and deleting files
- Using the text editor
- Printing text files
- Creating and running command files
- Sending and receiving mail
- A sample session
New computer science student? You'll probably need to learn UNIX in a hurry.
Graduating student? Take a look at those want ads. Big money employers have big metal rigs. If they're looking for UNIX programmers, the UNIX programmer who is comfortable with their big rigs will have a big advantage over some kid who only knows UNIX, Windows, and the Mac.
Think some of these operating systems are dinosaurs? Well, if you're right, who's going to port the applications away from them? People who know how to log on and get at and manipulate the files making up those applications, that's who. And then there are the shops repositioning their big rigs to be database servers--there's a lot of client/server work for people who can deal with clients and servers!
Operating Systems Handbook
by Bob DuCharme
ISBN 0-07-017891-7
Download the Acrobat files:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: UNIX
Part 3: OpenVMS
Part 4: OS/400
Part 5: VM/CMS
Part 6: MVS
Bob DuCharme is also the author of XSLT Quickly from Manning Publications and XML: The Annotated Specification and SGML CD from Prentice Hall.
If any of these chapters helps you at all and you have a PayPal account, feel free to
Buying a bound paperback from lulu.com
You can now buy bound hardcopy versions of the complete book or just the MVS section from lulu.com. You can download the Acrobat files used to create the books here to see what the books look like. I apologize that some of the screen shots got split across page breaks; the various XSL-FO and FOP tricks for preventing that just didn't seem to work for me. Also, keep in mind that the book hasn't been updated since it was written in 1994; that's why I'm making th content available for free. Many people still find in useful, particularly the MVS section. Caveat emptor.
| Fake Your Way Through Minis and Mainframes | Fake Your Way Through MVS |
|---|---|
| $19.98 | $9.98 |
| buy from lulu.com | buy from lulu.com |
| PDF of lulu version | PDF of lulu version |