Reviews

Learning the bash Shell by Bill Rosenblatt, Cameron Newham

brizreading's review against another edition

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4.0

Bash agility - fluency on the Unix/Linux terminal - is a super foundational meta-programming skill that I feel like gets short shrift as we all rush towards machine learning and cryptocurrency. Yo, but the stronger your bash fu, the easier your management of remote servers and such. Like, I did this the other day and basically floated away on a rainbow chariot pulled by mighty unicorns:
```pip freeze > diff - requirements.txt```
YES, I AM POWERFUL.

Just like Friedl's book on regular expressions, another clarifying book on an important meta topic, this bash book was SUPER helpful and I wish I had had it in 2014. I literally remember sitting at my desk in Dar es Salaam, staring at OSX Terminal and watching some Coursera course on some tech topic, and marveling at the instructors' bash incantations. Wtf was he doing?

"Is there some structured way to learn about Terminal!?" I thought. I didn't even know it was a shell language called bash! I didn't know shell != bash! Lots of stuff. I WIIISH I had had this then.

Anyway, yes, you can probably pick up these same bash skills by just osmosis over long periods of time. I did - there was a lot in here I had already learned (or had sorta half-known and used anyway), and I think experienced programmers will consider it real (bashy) basic. But if I had a young lady beginning her career transition journey into tech, I would hand her this and the regex book, and the keys to Udacity, and GODSPEED YOUNG MADAM.

And now, for much meta inspiration on people's hardware, editor, and shell choices, here's https://usesthis.com/

meaganc's review

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learncodethehardway is probably a more practical way to learn the basics (and is free(, but this one is a lot better for learning how to do vim and emacs and the kinds of stuff that comes up in interviews. Will definitely be using this one a lot.
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