The Linux Command Line

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I am gradually reading "The Linux command line" by William Shotts. He has been kind enough to provide it as a free download from his site. It is also available from No Starch Press should you want a dead tree copy. Google is your friend for links :)
I have been reading the free online version so am not sure on the differences.

It is one of those areas that I have been guilty of never spending the time to learn, I would occasionally learn via osmosis to solve a particular task. So felt I had a reasonable grasp of bash. But there are a lot of holes in my knowledge and this book is gradually filling them.

It is a good read and free, if you touch bash you should probably read it, that is unless you are an expert.

Reading this book is motivated by wanting to create a comfortable and efficient environment to code in at home. The requirements for work and home are different. I am much more likely to change languages at home and I have much more control over what get automated at home. Code bases as also significantly smaller allowing for a different approach to coding.

Finally I am likely to hit this code at the end of long days so being a comfortable environment will often win over reaching the peak of productivity.

That is why I decided to center my home dev environment on vim (well nvim). The keyboard controls are just more relaxing, particularly if on a laptop. It's a natural progression for this to spill over onto the command line. I have script to automatically build my code whenever I save a file. Smallish code bases make this possible.

As I have mentioned in the past I want to do this incrementally. Allowing myself to primarily to focus on 100% on set up would mean I would loose the next 6 months while I tinkered. That is not a good idea.

So this book is the next stage in gradually increasing my productivity while coding at home.

At some point I will collect my thoughts on this and write a longer article. Then again I would rather prove it is productive by releasing some things first as that is the real measure of productivity - Getting things done!

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