Software Developer's Guide To Linux | Book Review

I've never done a book review but there's a first time for everything, today we're taking a look at The Software Developer's Guide To Linux by David Cohen and Christian Sturn published by Packt Publishing

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DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase I may receive a small commission or other compensation.

[tutoriaLinux]

Hey, author of the book here -- thanks for doing this review! I actually enjoy your channel, which is why I suggested Packt reach out to you even though you're not exactly our target audience (Software Developers who are Linux Noobs). I was convinced you'd get a kick out of the book, so I'm a bit bummed out by this review but I appreciate your perspective. I'll make sure your feedback is incorporated into the 2nd edition if we do one.

Chris and I wrote this book to fill in a lot of the gaps we noticed in our software-engineer co-workers' knowledge and day-to-day Linux skills (that's why there's macOS and occasional Infra/Ops content in the book -- it's an easy way of meeting them where they are). I hope this book accomplishes that for enough people that there's demand for a second, expanded edition.

Oh, one thing: the DragonFly BSD cameo was just for fun -- Chris and I mainly run Linux at home and work, with a helping of FreeBSD on the side, but we really admire DragonFly BSD and this was our silly way of giving that project more exposure 😀Cheers!

[blt_r]

./configure is actually pretty common, especially in older projects. It is part of autotools build system

[darkspells]

I think the reason those vim recommendations are the way they are, is that its best to learn vim in a way that is portable to using vim through ssh on a remote box where all of your plugins might not exist.

Its the same reason people recommend never remapping vim commands, so that you can be comfortable with using vim in any environment even one you don't control. The idea is you want to learn VIM not learn your own custom version of vim that only exists on your machine.

[fehminjima]

we call !! bang bang, so sudo !! it's caled
sudo bang bang

[Thorou]

pacman -Sy being bad practice is actually very helpful info, I've done this myself without thinking about the implications. So thanks.

[Lampe]

13:51 Well, I've found SSH on Ubuntu to call the Kernel on my video hosting server "GNU/Linux". And the "GNU" part is only the userspace part, so the "GNU/" is plain wrong in the Kernel name.
When I log into SSH it welcomes me with the following line:
Welcome to Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.2.0 x86_64)

[SnowTheParrot]

Thanks for going in-depth and doing the hard work for us Brodie!
And also making sure people are doing what they say theyre supposed to be doing.
ACCOUNTABILITY is very important for educational authors.

[TheAtariSan]

./configure was kinda common back in 2010 when i started, when i cameback on arch in 2019, it was no longer the case. Cmake mainly replaced it. I have seen it once or twice since, mainly for a very old homebrew from gnome 2 era.

[bjbboy]

./configure is definitely common (especially if you've ever built LFS). it's just a bit old school is all, so a lot of projects have switched to cmake or something like that.

[AndersHass]

Hire Brodie to proof read the book before publishing next time, lol.

[zzco]

6:19 For a LONG, LONG while now, I've said many many MANY times to people close to me, documenting WHAT you are doing is mostly useless, except in certain niche or terse circumstances. Don't do that. Document WHY it's necessary, not WHAT you're doing. If you have to also document WHAT'S going on, then either you're a bad programmer OR what you're writing is INCREDIBLY FRIGGIN' niche.

[sweetbabyalaska]

zsh with zsh auto-completions, syntax highlighting, fzf-tab complete and fzf reverse history search is unparalleled. I rarely every have to type anything fully, its either in my history and easily editable with my editor using the zsh widget for editing the buffer in an editor, or I can literally tab complete out an entire line in a few seconds. Also Zoxide is amazing. It just auto-jumps to common directories. Like "z nvim" will just take you to ~/.config/nvim or "zi" will give you a fzf list to select a recent directory that is calculated using "frecency" frequency and recency. Books like this are good but there is no substitute to practical experience, and these books arent going to have the latest and greatest command line tools.

[orbatos]

I'm only going to say this in vague terms for reasons, take the message. This publisher pays for quantity over quality and nearly everything they publish originates from 3rd world college kids, then an american editor squishes it to form, often with help from chatgpt (this is not a joke).

[katanasteel]

So about on par for pact publishing. Compared to the few titles thats been on sale with humble bundles.

They say knowledge is power, but incomplete knowledge can be down right dangerous (eg. The chown -R case)

[zeriah]

15:40 calling package managers as similar to EXE files is wild, but comparing them to MacOS DMG files is probably even wilder. DMG files are almost closer to an ISO in functionality. All that happens when you open them is Mac creates a virtual drive which shows the contents of the DMG. The majority of the time, you then just drag and drop the dot application file into your applications folder with no further installation. If the app you’re installing needs more access to the system, only then you might get an installation window (akin to a wizard in Windows), but that’s a different file from the DMG.

[rjawiygvozd]

I had some kind of Linux system administrator's guide book as a kid, old enough that it was talking about Red Hat Linux instead of RHEL (along with suse and debian), those can be pretty fun

[WERTBON]

Many, many projects use ./configure actually, as a means to setup the environment (e.g. with flags that enable certain options for the subsequent make step) and to check if all dependencies are there.

[cheako]

This is sooo funny, I just setup x11vnc on my steamdeck with a script... and the blog/script I found did most of these must not do things and I got to keep all the pieces. Thanks for letting me know, now I think I need some hot-glue.

[joaomaria]

Yup, when compiling from source it is (or maybe it was until some years ago! and not anymore) common practice to ./configure ; make ; make install .

[MrRandsauce]

I read "the Linux programmers toolbox" and considered it a good purchase.