Bjorn Tipling

I was at Barnes & Nobles at the Pruneyard the other day looking through their collection of books on Linux. None of them seemed to fit me because they were all heavy on the GUI side of things. The distro specific books were also guilty of this. They were all focused on making Linux accessible to the new guy. It makes sense because the more advanced users will probably use the man or know where to look online for excellent information about Linux, or from a co-worker or friend online. But what I wanted was a book. And I found one! It’s called “A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming” and it’s by Mark Sobell.

It totally avoids the whole GUI thing and gets right into the meat of things. I think it makes a great companion to Linux In a Nutshell, which is basically the man with examples and a reference section (which make it worth it). I’ve already learned a great deal such as the less command, using CNTRL+U to clear a line, pausing, resuming and killing jobs. It’s just the various little things you might not pick up online but that really make Linux so much easier to use. For instance if you’re using a Virtual Terminal and doing an LS on a directory full of stuff I might in the past have LS >’ed into a file and then would have checked out the file (because you can’t scroll up in the VT), but with less there’s no need: LS | less does the trick.