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

Common misunderstandings about HTTP

When developing web applications and HTTP APIs, it can pay to be aware of a few details that many developers miss. Let’s look at a few of the key areas where knowing a bit extra can really pay off in terms of the reliability of the applications you create. The curl skills we cover in this chapter will also give you the ability to start troubleshooting something as vague as “the website is down” from the command line.

HTTP statuses

In the following sections, we will cover some of the common HTTP statuses you’ll encounter. We’ll also consider some important information and myths about these statuses that you should keep in mind.

Don’t just check for 200 OK

A common way to check for errors is only checking for a 200 or the whole 2xx range of status codes to know whether a request was a success. There are some caveats to be aware of when doing this, though.

The 200 range (2xx, as in, every...