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

Quick note: configuration in Docker

Earlier in this chapter, we mentioned that Docker is often the exception when it comes to configuration. Because Docker containers are a much more minimal environment, they don’t have a lot of the extra binaries, services, and configuration files that you’ll find in a traditional Unix system. But because much of the software that software developers create now runs in containers, as opposed to traditional, full operating system environments, we want to cover some basics here to make sure you’ve got an intuition for how configuration is different in Docker containers. We’ll dig much deeper into Docker containers in general in Chapter 15, Containerizing Applications with Docker.

In a container environment – whether it’s Docker or another container runtime – you’re dealing with a dramatically smaller environment. There are very few installed programs and utilities, a dramatically stripped...