Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

By : David Cohen, Christian Sturm
5 (2)
Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

5 (2)
By: David Cohen, Christian Sturm

Overview of this book

Developers are always looking to raise their game to the next level, yet most are completely lost when it comes to the Linux command line. This book is the bridge that will take you to the next level in your software development career. Most of the skills in the book can be immediately put to work to make you a more efficient developer. It’s written specifically for software engineers, not Linux system administrators, so each chapter will equip you with just enough theory to understand what you’re doing before diving into practical commands that you can use in your day-to-day work as a software developer. As you work through the book, you’ll quickly absorb the basics of how Linux works while you get comfortable moving around the command line. Once you’ve got the core skills, you’ll see how to apply them in different contexts that you’ll come across as a software developer: building and working with Docker images, automating boring build tasks with shell scripts, and troubleshooting issues in production environments. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to use Linux and the command line comfortably and apply your newfound skills in your day-to-day work to save time, troubleshoot issues, and be the command-line wizard that your team turns to.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

Command line vs. shell

In this book, we refer to a “command-line environment.” We define this as any text-based environment that acts as a kind of REPL, specifically for interacting with the operating system, programming language interpreter, database, etc. A “command-line” environment or interface describes the general idea of how you’re interacting with a system.

But there’s a more specific term which we’ll use here: shell.

A shell is a specific program that implements this command-line environment and lets you give it text commands. Technically, there are lots of different shells which provide the same kind of REPL-based command-line environment, often for wildly different things:

  • Bash is a common shell environment for interacting with Linux and Unix operating systems.
  • Popular databases like Postgres, MySQL, and Redis all provide a shell for developers to interact with and run commands in.
  • Most interpreted...