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

You just learned the basics of how Linux uses the abstractions of users and groups to manage and control processes, files, and other resources on a system. Just as importantly, you learned the basic commands you need to create and manage users and groups on a real system. You learned about the important difference between the root user and all of the other normal users on a system.

Then, we walked through a practical exercise where you created a user, added a group to the system, modified that user, and then cleaned up all the resources you created.

Finally, we went beyond the day-to-day commands to show you that there’s no magic behind the scenes here: it’s all just plaintext files that define users and groups on a Unix system. This is a good thing; it’s going to make your life as a developer easy, whether you’re:

  • Creating a Docker image to run your application as a specific non-root user.
  • Setting up a long-running cloud...