From spm Fri Dec 30 12:15:16 1983
From: spm (Steve Miller)
Message-Id: <8312301715.AA17916@athena.UUCP>
Received: by athena.UUCP (4.12/3.7)
	id AA17916; Fri, 30 Dec 83 12:15:09 est
Date: 30 Dec 1983 1215-EST (Friday)
To: athena
Cc: 
Subject: review of "A Guide to Unix for the VMS User"
Status: R


This guide was written by Michael Urban, TRW, and is proprietary.

I read the entire guide, except the editor sections discussing
ex and vi, and found it a reasonable document.

It presents the experienced VMS user with analogies between VMS and
Unix to aid migration to a Unix system.  The areas discussed
include the everyday tools- terminal characteristics, file system,
command interpreter, editor, debugger, text processors, and
writer's tools.  The coverage of the different areas was uneven;
perhaps the best and most complete was the shell presentation.
 
As an introductory guide, it is nowhere near complete or sufficient
in terms of both breadth and depth.  I also found that it did
not sufficiently emphasize the serious design differences between
the systems.  While they were often noted, they did not stand out from
the nuts and bolts comparisons.

Some of the information is outdated (e.g. sdb debugger) and there are
some inaccuracies or skewed interpretations.

In summary, I found it a worthwhile investment of an hour or two's
reading as a supplement to Unix documentation and experience. Had 
such a document been available when first learning BSD Unix, I would
have saved more than enough learning time to repay the investment.
I recommend that we make a subset of it available to Athena users,
if that can be done at a reasonable cost.