Thursday, June 07, 2012

The Linux Command Line

As a long-time, professional Unix/Linux sysadmin, I spend a lot of time on the commandline. I've grown pretty familiar with it, but I often find that junior teammates don't have the same familiarity. They often grew up in a world of windows and GUIs. That means I spend a lot of time helping them learn the ropes.

When I saw that No Starch Press had published The Linux Command Line, I wanted to take a look and see if it would make a good primer for the new guys on my team. Then, the good folks at No Starch sent me a review copy and I figured I'd better act on it.



This is a decent sized book, weighing in at 430 pages and 36 easily digestible chapters. The writing and layout are pretty good, and there are a ton of examples.

Part One is 10 chapters (~110 pages) that cover the basics: built-ins and simple commands; redirection; command line short-cuts (for bash in emacs-mode); permissions; and processes.

Part Two is 3 chapters that will jumpstart you getting beyond command line use. These talk about: setting and using environment variables and startup files; using vim; and making the command prompt more useful.

Part Three is a bit meatier. This contains 10 chapters covering tools for: package management; networking; working w/ storage media; regular expressions; working with text, and more. A couple of chapters in here seem less than necessary (E.g., Chapter 23 'Compiling Programs') but if you don't need them, you can always skip over them.

Part Four dives into scripting, where the true power of the command line comes out. There are 13 chapters which cover: designing scripts; conditionals; looping; parameters; and more.

My biggest complaint about this book is its bash centricity. It would have been nice to throw in a chapter and some sidebars talking about how other shells differ, or mentioning those parts that only bash provides. Since dash is becoming more frequent on Linux systems, it would seem like a natural comparison to make in the text.

Still, this is a good book on using the Linux Command Line. If you're just getting started with Linux, or you have a friend and/or coworker that needs some help, this is a good place to start.

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