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

A note on scriptability

Earlier, we alluded to preferring automatable tools like useradd, instead of interactive wizard-based tools like adduser – even if those automatable tools are a bit more complex or hard to learn. Or perhaps you’re asking, “Why not just use a graphical tool, instead of these hard-to-remember CLI commands?”

One of the things we want to teach you during the course of this book is to generally prefer non-interactive commands.

Because these commands don’t rely on real-time user input when they run, they are scriptable: creating a hundred users is almost as easy as creating one. This really comes in handy when you’re dealing with real-life problems like building Docker images, repeatedly preparing production environments, or writing cloud-init setup scripts for your cloud instances.

As a developer, this should ring true: automating things makes them more repeatable, safe, and fast. By learning commands that are...