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

Best practices for commit messages

As a general rule, “one change per commit, and one commit per change” is the way to keep your Git commits – and history – useful.

There are many situations where you might only work on one major change, but also add a few minor (unrelated) corrections and improvements to the code. These unrelated changes should generally be committed separately, though. It’s a good idea to keep individual commits focused on the one specific thing you are trying to accomplish: a minor fix, fixing a typo, changing style, adding a (single) feature, and so on. Even if you end up making multiple interrelated changes at once, it might still make sense to split them up into multiple commits later. Committing more frequently can make this process a lot easier.

There are many reasons for this rule. One of the most practical reasons is that when your commits are small, individual changes can be easily cherry-picked or reverted should...