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
Other Books You May Enjoy
19
Index

Caution Required curl | bash:

Many online sources – even trustworthy and popular ones – recommend a command-line install process that looks like this:

curl $SOMEURL | bash

This uses the curl command to download content from the web, and then uses that content as the input (|, the pipe character, which we’ll cover in the “Pipes” chapter) for running bash. When you do this, you’re essentially running a script stored on the Web instead of as a local file. This can be an extremely convenient way of installing software, but please be absolutely sure that it’s coming from a trustworthy source.

We recommend always at least looking at the script source, which you can see in the browser by visiting $SOMEURL from this command, or by splitting this into two commands.

To split something like this into two commands, one to download the installer script and the second to run it:

# Download the installer and name the resulting file installer.sh
curl...