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

Nano

Nano is a small and easy-to-use CLI text editor. One of the features of nano — you might even call it the main feature — is that it prominently has a keyboard-shortcut cheat sheet bolted to the bottom of your screen while you happily edit text in your terminal. This is particularly useful if you’re under stress and not used to editing text on the command line.

Nano is good in a pinch, but you won’t find it installed in more minimal environments (such as Docker containers or production VMs). Be aware that nano also tends to automatically make backup files (~yourfile.txt), thereby potentially polluting the filesystem.

Installing nano

On all the popular Linux distributions you’re likely to use, the package name for nano is nano – use your preferred OS’s package manager to install it (in this case, we’re installing it on Ubuntu):

apt-get install nano

Nano cheat sheet

You can find an official, up-to-date...