4 ms·
In my experience, you pretty much learn this on the fly. You don't know how to do X, you google it, if you do X often enough, you'll eventually learn. After a w
by eLobato 14y ago
In my experience, you pretty much learn this on the fly. You don't know how to do X, you google it, if you do X often enough, you'll eventually learn. After a while you end up mastering most of the unix suite (ls, grep, awk, du, etc..) so instead of googling stuff you write it.
Unlike fundamentals (think books like SICP, Introduction to Algorithms, K&R, the Dragon book, et al), this is just a collection of useful commands that do not bring barely any collateral learning aside from learning the 'UNIX' way.
If you really want to put up the effort to learn this, and you don't have any projects or anything that requires this knowledge, I've noticed lots of tech offices have a copy of UNIX in a nutshell always have a copy around. I've checked it out myself and it's pretty useful (I already 'know'), not sure how good is it for learning this stuff from the ground up.
- sudara 14y agoThis is a great reply. "On the fly" is definitely my experience too. Needing to do something. Doing things slowly, inefficiently, with googling until you find or get told the more efficient way of doing things. Also, talking with/demanding explanations/debating with geekier than thou friends has been really helpful with the bigger concepts.
- exDM69 14y agoLearning by doing is probably the way most people learn their unixcraft. It also helps if you have a friend or a team member who is a lot more experienced than you, a go-to guy with infinite patience to your stupid questions. I had the privilege of working with a badass russian unix hacker for some time, he taught me how to do black magic with find, grep, sort and uniq.
- riffraff 14y agoI second the idea of learning on the job, especially by things going bad. I have the feeling ops people can be somehow.. "measured".. by how many things they had exploding in their face, and then learned how to fix them. For example, looking at TFA, the first thing I thought is "oh, `df -i` should be there too". Because I ran out of inodes enough times that I learned to check that (though I am not a sysadmin).