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

Basic command-line skills

To work effectively with Linux, you need to know the absolute basics: how the system is structured, how to look and move around on the system, and how to read and edit files. In this section, we’ll cover all of that, and get you comfortable with the very basics of navigating a Linux system.

Throughout the rest of this book, we’ll dive deeper into each of these topics and commands, but we want to make sure you have a minimal, functioning set of skills by the time you get to the end of this chapter.

Unix filesystem basics

In graphical user interfaces, directories (called folders in macOS) are represented by icons. Perhaps you’re used to seeing neat little rows of these in your home directory - Desktop, Documents, Videos, and so on. Double-clicking on a directory icon opens a new window with a new view from inside that directory.

When we use the term “filesystem,” we mean exactly this – a collection of...