I would like to get better at the Mac command prompt (sorry – bash shell), and learn the basics of writing batch files (sorry – shell scripts). I see lots of books about both, but they all look alike and pretty lame to me. They’re either aimed at the you-know-nothing-about-computers crowd and hence I’m paying for 10 chapters I’ll never need, or they’re so pure reference that I can’t really get any practical examples.

Anybody have some recommendations?

I don’t know how well this solves your problem, but I liked Apple’s Shell Scripting Primer – available as a PDF here

That looks excellent, James. Thanks.