Product: 0131478230

This book is like the course you wish you could take at college but they don’t offer because they are making you learn theoretical things like what a turing machine is, and other things you will likely never use.

This is a great practicel, no-nonsense introduction to Linux for those who are at the command line and want to know what to do next. How do you navigate the file system? What do those weird files like ‘bin’ and ‘dev’ and ‘boot’ mean? How can you change your command line to look cool? How do you write scripts to carry out commands in the command line? What is a pipeline? How the heck does this vi editor work? What is it to ‘grep’ a file? And on and on. All with practical examples to help you get started fast.

The only reason I give it four, rather than five, stars is because the coverage is a bit shotgun, rather than systematic. On page 45 he will mention something that you won’t learn about until page 223. I would rather have a more linear, methodical introduction. However, I think that might well be impossible in a book of this scope. You have to have some nonlinearities in the structure, I just think this has a few too many.
Rating: 4
0131478230
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