Preface

– Begin.

The Princess Bride (1987)

Who this book is for

This book is meant for anyone who wants to be more productive in a Unix environment such as

Linux or Mac OS. This is an introductory textbook, so the reader is supposed to have no previous

knowledge of the subject matter, and they should expect to learn the most important commands and

concepts they might be using daily.

In recent years the gap between developers and system administrators has been fortunately reduced

in various ways, all under the umbrella of the devops philosophy, so this book will be useful to those

developers that have to start getting in touch with the “bare metal”. These developers might find in

the book a gradual learning curve and a quick reference for the most common commands of a Unix

environment.

On the other hand, there are people (like the author of this book) who are interested in the low-

level side of applications development and want to pursue a career as system administrators or

architects. For these people, this book can be a good starting point, where they can be introduced to

tools and concepts they will use every single day. They will probably soon feel the need of something

more complete and deeper, and there are tons of books and resources that can quench the thirst for

knowledge, but I hope they will enjoy the first steps that they will move together with me.

Why this book exists

When I decided to write this book I was working on a series of short workshops for my junior

colleagues. I hadn’t worked with juniors for many years, and while I was perfectly conscious that

some people didn’t grow up with a command line, practically speaking I was assuming that they

knew what I did, which is probably a mistake that many advanced programmers make.

So, I decided to run some sessions in which we discovered the bash shell, starting from the simplest

commands up to some proper scripting. I was rewarded (and I still am) by a lot of satisfied smiles

when they finally got the right sequence of pipes or when they discovered regular expressions. From

those sessions, and from the notes that I wrote to prepare them, I had the idea of a book that could