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

Load Balancing and HTTP

We’re going to take a slightly different approach with this chapter, so buckle up. On the one hand, we’re going to review some background on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and focus on some misconceptions that trip up many web developers in the real world.

On the other hand, we’re going to keep this practical and cover one of the most powerful standard HTTP tools that’s available on the command line, curl. Specifically, we’re going to teach you the basics of curl in the context of how you can use it to troubleshoot common web application issues.

We assume that if you’re a web developer, you already know your way around HTTP. So, while the goal of this chapter is not to teach you the absolute basics of this protocol, we are going to review some of those basics to get you up to speed if it’s been a while. If you are totally new to HTTP, there is lots of excellent documentation on the web that you...