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

Why you need Bash scripting basics

Shell scripts are an indispensable tool for any developer; even if you’re not writing scripts on a weekly basis, you’ll be reading them. In this chapter, we’ll cover the basics you need to know so that you feel comfortable when, for example:

  • You’re confronted by a shell script that someone wrote a few years ago, for example “Can you check to see if we can reuse the automation scripts that Steve wrote before he left for Google?”
  • You see an opportunity to write your own shell script, when you have a job that existing shell programs already solve (filtering, searching, sorting output, and feeding one program’s output into another one).
  • You want to control precisely what goes into each Docker layer as you build up an image.
  • You need to coordinate other software in the context of a Linux server’s operating system: startup ordering, error checking, aborting early between...