To get the most out of this book

If you can get yourself to a Linux shell prompt – by installing Ubuntu in a virtual machine or running it as a Docker container, for example – you can follow along with everything in this book.

You can get away with even less – on Windows, there’s WSL, and macOS is a bona-fide Unix operating system, so almost all of the practical commands you learn in this book (except those called out as Linux-only) will work out of the box. That said, for the best experience, follow along on a Linux operating system.

The skills required to get the most out of this book are only the basic computer skills that you already have as a software developer – editing text, working with files and folders, having some notion of what “operating systems” are, installing software, and using a development environment. Everything beyond that, we’ll teach you.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/gbp/9781804616925.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example: “The -f flag stands for ‘follow,’ and the -u flag stands for ‘unit.’”

A block of command line is set as follows:

/home/steve/Desktop# ls
anotherfile  documents  somefile.txt  stuff
/home/steve/Desktop# cd documents/
/home/steve/Desktop/documents# ls
contract.txt

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. For example: “When a file is set to be executable, Unix will do its best to execute it, either succeeding in the case of ELF (Executable and Linkable Format, probably the most widely used executable format today) or failing.”