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

In this chapter, you learned the basics of managing the software that’s installed in your Linux environment. First, we looked at how to accomplish this the easy way: software management via the package managers you’re most likely to encounter. Although this first approach should cover 90% of your needs, you then learned about the procedures you’ll need to apply to the last 10% of situations – careful vetting, followed by using custom install scripts or manual compilation and installation.

Hopefully you followed along with the practical compilation example and tried out the htop system monitor. Thankfully, htop is available via package managers everywhere – it’s a really useful tool that a lot of system administrators find invaluable on long-running production systems.

You should now be comfortable with the high-level concepts and practical commands you’ll need to effectively use many Unix and Linux systems, in both...