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

Conclusion

Logging can be a moving target in modern production environments. Learning and experimenting with the basics covered in this chapter should give you a good foundation. It is our hope that getting comfortable with syslog and journalctl will also equip you with a low-level understanding and historical perspective that will make it easier for you to work out how tomorrow’s logging-as-a-service solution actually works under the covers.

We think you’ll find that the skills you learned in this chapter give you a practical, measurable advantage when it comes to designing, debugging, and optimizing the applications you create and deploy. Mastering the basics of journald, as you just saw, lets you swiftly diagnose and pinpoint issues, whether they are related to your application specifically or to the larger Linux system around it. Having some understanding of alternative and historical Linux logging approaches will help when you’re troubleshooting systems...