[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How can a intermediate-beginner learn Unix/L...
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Ask HN: How can a intermediate-beginner learn Unix/Linux and
programming?
For a long time, I've been in an awkward position with my knowledge
of computers. I know basic JavaScript (syntax and booleans and
nothing more). I've learned the bare basics of Linux from setting
up a Pi-hole. I understand the concept of secure hashes. I even
know some regex. The problem is, I know so little that I can't
actually _do_ anything with this knowledge. I suppose I'm looking
for a tutorial that will teach me to be comfortable with the
command line and a Unix environment, while also teaching me to code
a language. Where should I start?
Author : learnTemp229462
Score : 52 points
Date : 2020-03-21 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
| jonahlibrach wrote:
| Learning to use the command line is a requirement for all serious
| programmers and its great you want to start.
|
| It can be pretty overwhelming to use the terminal so you may have
| to some reading to get yourself really comfortable.
|
| I usually go to books/(book pdfs) to help me start out because
| they have conceptual explanations about the syntax which really
| helps my understanding.
|
| Maybe this one would be good? The Linux Command Line, 2nd
| Edition: A Complete Introduction
|
| Once I'm comfortable based on the book, using StackOverflow and
| other websites becomes much, MUCH easier.
|
| In the process, you'll learn BASH which is used for scripting.
| severine wrote:
| > _Maybe this one would be good? The Linux Command Line, 2nd
| Edition: A Complete Introduction_
|
| Free PDF in the author's (William Shotts) homepage:
| http://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php/
| tdy721 wrote:
| Keep hacking your raspberry pi. Customize your shell with a
| profile; maybe alias LS so it always uses color? Find some
| packages to install. Cowsay, and SL are great, udderly useless ;)
| programs. Check em out.
|
| Keep projects small, just patch together open source code for
| fun, and read the open stuff you do use.
|
| You could also switch the GUI environment of your raspberry pi.
| Install headless raspbian and install he GUI from the CLI. Just
| hack!
|
| My koan is video poker, I've rewritten a whole game about 3
| times. I also like writing prime number finders in new languages.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| https://tldp.org
| mooneater wrote:
| I disagree with lots of advice here.
|
| My strategy to solidify my linux skills was simple: commit to
| linux desktop. We spend most of our time on our desktop, may as
| well let that time earn you skill points. I picked ubuntu and use
| the same on servers. You naturally learn a bit every day through
| daily use. This really adds up over time without extra effort of
| using a side system. Getting good at windows or osx is a waste of
| your time unless you are specifically into those platforms.
|
| As for a language, pick one that is (1) easy to start with (2)
| covers advanced use cases, (3) sound in its design, (4) general
| purpose, (5) concise. That rules out C (due to 1), JS (due to 3
| and 4), php (2,3,4) and most things really.
|
| For me that left me with ubuntu and python, I never looked back.
| (Yes I know many other things but that is my home base.)
| roenxi wrote:
| Commit to using, _breaking and fixing_ a Linux desktop to learn
| quickly. I learned a lot running Debian Unstable back back when
| men were men and unstable was really unstable; so the 2010s.
|
| If minor things are constantly going wrong and getting fixed
| then the only way that can happen is the user building up a
| good mental model of how the system works.
|
| An update that breaks X11 will teach you a world of information
| about terminals. "How do I use a messaging client in a
| terminal?", "What text editors work in a terminal?", "How do I
| browse the web from a terminal?", "What games are there for
| terminals", "How do I watch a movie in the terminal" (ascii).
|
| Get forced to live like that for a week and you also learn how
| to fix X11 (eg, learning about the difference between 2D and 3D
| graphics drivers, OSS vs non-OSS drivers, kernel vs userspace).
| Valuable life skills. Godspeed to the Wayland devs.
| asveikau wrote:
| It is trendy to hate C now, but if you want to understand a
| Unix-like OS I think it is mandatory and they go hand in hand.
| Otherwise, you will have no idea what kind of interface your
| higher level language is abstracting.
|
| It's ok to not like it, but don't let that dislike be due to
| lack of understanding.
| fao_ wrote:
| > , (5) concise. That rules out C (due to 1)
|
| That's interesting, most people I've started on C have found it
| easier to start out in that than say, Java, which has been on a
| hell of a lot of introductory courses for a decade now
| empath75 wrote:
| Counterpoint: I've been a Linux sysadmin and developer for
| close to 10 years at this point and I've never used Linux as a
| desktop. I've only used MacBooks.
|
| The skills you need to run Linux on the laptop aren't
| particularly close to what you'd need to run Linux as a server,
| IMO, particularly Linux as a VM.
| Jnr wrote:
| I remember I used Ubuntu Desktop in 2008 for a year or two.
| But Ubuntu is point and click and anyone can use it. I did
| not learn much about Linux using it.
|
| I felt that I really started understanding how things work
| when I switched to something requiring more reading -
| Archlinux.
|
| To get a running desktop it not only required doing all kinds
| of things I did not understand back then, it also provided
| great Wiki to get there. I still sometimes end up in that
| Wiki to quickly get up to speed about some tools or concepts.
|
| And the fact that it is rolling release distro and was always
| running the latest upstream software version meant that
| frequently at least the UI part broke down, and that forced
| me to learn even more things. :)
|
| That was only the beginning but now it feels like it opened
| many possibilities and career paths for me. It probably was a
| bit frustrating at the beginning but it is worth it.
| jpxw wrote:
| OS X exposes you to a decent amount of Unix stuff anyway.
| It's quite a good compromise imo.
| unixhero wrote:
| Yes. Run a Linux desktop and only stay in it.
| jameshe wrote:
| Based on personal experience, I can totally echo this comment.
| I am a business undergrad (senior year), but I am a JavaScript
| developer for a local start-up. On my Windows laptop, my
| workflow included applications from MS Office, as well as
| PowerShell and Vim. At the beginning of this semester, my
| laptop broke (screen) and I couldn't afford a repair, so I dug
| up an old ThinkPad T430 that I installed Ubuntu on a couple
| years back. It was an old machine (2012?) that I bought used,
| after some searching done on my phone, I upgraded the OS and
| got to work.
|
| Based on my experience with the switch, I've learned miles more
| about Linux and how computers work than I would've before. I
| might even say I like the experience more than I did before. On
| top of that, as the parent comment says, I've learned more
| about Linux, shell script, the directory tree, regular
| expressions, etc., than I think I would've otherwise by self-
| teaching. It might (read: "definitely will") be uncomfortable
| at first, but the Linux community is big and helpful and
| there's plenty of great open-source software that can replace
| your old workflows.
|
| As far as picking a language goes, I started with Python for
| the reasons above, but really, starting anywhere is better than
| being stuck deciding. Common starting points are Python, Java,
| JavaScript, C#, but really, just pick any language with a large
| community to help you out. When you think you know enough,
| consider ideas for a personal project, which is where you'll
| likely learn the most. After that, keep learning and if you
| think you want to learn something else, you'll realize how much
| easier it will be with one language under your belt already.
| pbh101 wrote:
| Some resources I've found helpful to learn some command-line:
|
| - https://cmdchallenge.com/. This set of increasing-in-difficulty
| challenges should help with structure in terms of learning a bit
| more.
|
| - https://explainshell.com/ can be helpful as well.
|
| - Don't forget the man pages! `man <command>` can be quite
| helpful! For a different approach on teaching some, bropages.org
| could be helpful.
|
| - I haven't used it personally, but there is a lot of info at
| http://www.opsschool.org/
|
| As for learning to program, I suggest a very good starter
| language is Python, and its built-in, first-party language
| reference/tutorial I found helpful when I learned it:
| https://docs.python.org/3.8/tutorial/index.html
|
| As for "what" to program after that, I don't have any great
| resources for what constitutes some good initial programs. Off
| the top of my head, here are some ideas about places to start
| which are doable with only inputting and outputting text:
|
| - FizzBuzz
|
| - Play Rock Paper Scissors with the computer
|
| - Play Tic Tac Toe with the Computer
|
| - Sieve of Eratosthenes
|
| - Conway's Game of Life
|
| - Given a piece of text, count how many occurrences of each word
| there are and display the top ten.
| morty_s wrote:
| There are many ways, but here is one:
|
| Read and lightly work through The C Programming Language (K&R).
| Code along with the book, don't feel you have to really deep-dive
| anything.
|
| You don't have to learn C well at this point. Just learn from it.
|
| Then start reading The Art Of Unix Programming. Do this casually.
| Read a bit, code a bit. Between K&R and TAOUP, you'll be inspired
| by to write at least two small projects.
|
| To supplement K&R and TAOUP, begin reading Unix Network
| Programming.
|
| If you have access to a Mac or a Linux machine, explore the man
| pages.
|
| If you're on a Mac, explore the man pages __and__ the code that
| lives on your system.
|
| One way to do this is to use something like vscode's intellisense
| to "Go to Definition." E.g., when you're coding an example from
| K&R, right click on one of the included headers, and click "Go to
| definition." It will take you to the header file. Look through
| the code. Then you could look at the code from FreeBSD or OpenBSD
| on GitHub.
|
| Edit: Just wanted to add, by doing the above you'll get exposure
| to your system in new ways. Moreover, you'll find yourself
| learning Unix out of necessity, for fun, and by accident. You can
| practice the art of Unix programming in almost any language at
| this point. C is unix-y, but so is Rust.
| osrec wrote:
| Download Ubuntu and run it as a virtual machine inside your
| current machine (use Google for instructions - it's fairly
| straightforward with a piece of software called virtualbox). That
| should stop you from running into hardware related compatibility
| issues.
|
| Get familiar with the interface and the concept of a "terminal".
|
| Then try do some simple stuff. Maybe set up nginx (or Apache) to
| run a web server that you can access via your host machine.
|
| Thereafter try doing some Linux admin tasks, like creating users,
| switching users. Maybe even set up SSH and try accessing the
| virtual machine from your host machine via PuTTY.
|
| After, maybe try spinning up a simple node web app on the virtual
| machine and access it from a browser on your host machine.
|
| By this time, you'll probably get a sense of what you want to
| explore next! And remember, Google it's your friend for all of
| the above!
|
| All the best :)
| learnTemp229462 wrote:
| I'll probably use my raspberry pi instead of installing a VM.
| osrec wrote:
| Sure - the only benefit of a VM is that you can mess up the
| VM's filesystem without worrying about it too much.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Making terrible mistakes on real machines teaches you much
| more though (by sheer necessity if nothing else).
| b215826 wrote:
| _The Missing Semester of Your CS Education_ [1] is a set of
| tutorials from MIT that gets you to speed with using the CLI,
| using a text editor (Vim), version controlling (using Git), basic
| debugging, etc. Some tutorials aren 't perfect (e.g., an earlier
| version had things like `for f in $(ls)` [3]), but at least they
| link to good tools and resources. There's also Software Carpentry
| [2], which has similar goals. You might also want to check out
| _The Bash Guide_ [4,5], which is hands down the best Bash
| tutorial written.
|
| [1]: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/
|
| [2]: https://software-carpentry.org/lessons/index.html
|
| [3]: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs
|
| [4]: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide
|
| [5]: https://guide.bash.academy/
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I wonder if introducing newbies to makefiles and vim is super
| empowering, or ends up gatekeeping by making it look "as
| complicated as you feared it would be."
|
| I feel like before any of that:
|
| 1. Do practical stuff with Python
|
| 2. Learn the semantics behind the Linux directory tree
|
| 3. CLI, piping stuff together, a little bit of bash.
| jahbrewski wrote:
| But at some point isn't it helpful to know that some things
| _are_ as difficult as you fear, and you just have to power
| through? I picked up vim early in my programming career and I
| think it was one of the best decisions I've made; I use it
| every day. Yeah, there's a time and place for learning
| "easier" things, but there's also a time to buckle down, get
| serious, and dig in.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| i am a student and even using nano makes me feel less
| efficient and productive.
|
| is there something I am missing out by not using vim?
| b215826 wrote:
| > _is there something I am missing out by not using vim?_
|
| Being able to use vi is a very handy skill if you're a
| sysadmin or SSH into other computers/clusters very
| frequently. Since vi is part of the POSIX specification,
| all Unix systems would have some implementation of vi. Of
| course, Vim is much more powerful than a text editor like
| nano, but also requires more investment to learn. It
| won't make you a better programmer, but it might make you
| a faster programmer.
| threatofrain wrote:
| It's hard to look like a true haxxor.
| b215826 wrote:
| > _I wonder if introducing newbies to makefiles and vim is
| super empowering, or ends up gatekeeping by making it look
| "as complicated as you feared it would be."_
|
| This tutorial introduces Vim only after introducing shell and
| pipes. I was wrong about makefiles -- this tutorial doesn't
| include makefiles (I was thinking about Software Carpentry
| [1], which has similar goals). In any case, learning Vim
| isn't hard as people make it out to be, and one can easily
| skip that part of the tutorial to come back to at a later
| point without breaking the continuity.
|
| [1]: https://software-carpentry.org/lessons/index.html
| sys_64738 wrote:
| You need a goal which is a tangible end product. Everything else
| derives from that core requirement. E.g. write a multithreaded
| chat program with a separate remote backend.
| klyrs wrote:
| That's way complicated for a newbie project... I'd go with
| something like a snake game
| toohotatopic wrote:
| Try this recent HN submission: Text Processing in the Shell
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590824
| smitty1e wrote:
| I regularly recommend installing VirtualBox, obtaining a Linux
| distro, e.g. fro. OSBoxes.org, and using it to do a
| http://linuxfromscratch.org/ project.
|
| LFS is well-document and maintained, and levels you up in a jiffy
| on the practical basics.
|
| It's not about programming per se, but covers quite a few
| concepts you're expected to "just know".
|
| Plenty of pointers to more advanced concepts, too.
| seankross wrote:
| I wrote a free book for getting started with the command line
| that may interest you: https://seankross.com/the-unix-workbench/
| smabie wrote:
| I would recommend learning Linux the way I did 15 or so years
| ago: get rid of other operating systems and use a more 'advanced'
| distribution (such as Arch or Gentoo). In my case, I fucked up my
| Windows install on a new laptop when I was 12. At that point, I
| was stuck and just decided to stick with Linux. It's remarkable
| how quickly you learn when you absolutely need to in order to use
| the computer.
|
| My second piece of advice would be to learn C from this book:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language
|
| After finishing it and completing all the exercises, you should
| be ready to go learn anything else you want to.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Shoehorn Linux into your life, even when there are other
| solutions that you're familiar with that already solve your
| problems.
| grumpy8 wrote:
| I strongly recommend "A Practical Guide to Linux Commands,
| Editors, and Shell Programming". It's a great overview of many
| things linux & command line. Very approachable for beginners and
| more than good enough to make them dangerous.
| nicklaf wrote:
| Honestly? When I was in high school I was fortunate enough to
| find a copy of _The Unix Programming Environment_ [0], which is a
| marvelously accessible tutorial introduction to incrementally
| building UNIX(r) programs using nothing more than the pipe
| operator, which means you can start writing 'programs' that work
| on the output of other programs, until your program snowballs
| into a longer pipeline. The book was published in 1984 and works
| verbatim on any Linux system today.
|
| Once you grasp how powerful this closed system of incrementally
| processing text is, you are sort of unstoppable at the command in
| a *nix system.
|
| Pay careful attention to regular expressions, which are a
| universal tool in Unix for processing text. Along with Unix'
| treatment of files as a stream of newline terminated strings,
| this how Unix gets away with working with unstructured files
| instead of something like XML or S-expressions): that is, most
| Unix tools expect you to work with a file (or file descriptor,
| which is a pointer to any file-like thing in memory), and to
| process it one line at a time, and to use regular expressions to
| parse those lines into fields.
|
| Working with lines using regular expressions is how the original
| editor, /bin/ed, was conceived, before the existence of visual
| editors like Vim and Emacs: you can find, print, and also edit
| lines in the file using regular expression syntax in ed, and this
| knowledge, btw, translates to fluent use of regular expressions
| in both sed ("stream editor", or basically a non-interactive
| version of /bin/ed, which essentially executes your editor
| commands and then exits), and egrep (which searches for lines
| matching your regular expression).
|
| In fact, once you start to see these pieces come together, look
| for examples in Kernighan and Pike[0] which demonstrate the use
| of awk. Awk is an extremely powerful but also extremely simple
| tool for processing data in Unix, using all the concepts I just
| described, and not much else. It has a few extra features, like
| variables and loops, which you'd expect in a programming
| language, but you are expected to use Awk exactly like you'd use
| things like grep, ed, and the shell. It's just that now you've
| got this very compact, powerful notation for splitting records
| (lines) into fields (regular expression matches), and then doing
| arbitrary things with them to spit text back out. You could even
| write your own database using something like Awk, and you can
| read about how to do database-like tasks in the classic and
| accessible book on Awk by the original authors of the tool (Aho,
| Weinberger, and Kernighan, whose last initials together form the
| name AWK)[1].
|
| Then, much later in life, when you find yourself doing some fancy
| stuff in Haskell and creating a DSL to do things like process
| pipelines, you realize that Awk was actually way ahead of its
| time.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environme...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_AWK_Programming_Language
| bluemooner wrote:
| Here's a couple of tutorials on various tools that might be
| useful for a beginner: https://missing.csail.mit.edu/
| stank345 wrote:
| My advice is to start working on a project you care about and
| then learn everything required to make it happen. If you already
| know JavaScript, maybe build and deploy a static website. Once
| you've done that then perhaps make it interact with an API.
| jordanpg wrote:
| This. Having something to actually accomplish is much more
| important than finding the ultimate book or online course.
| There are lots of those.
|
| Pick one and move on to defining a realistic project that seems
| interesting and achievable.
|
| Most important of all, finish it, and write what you did down
| somewhere. It took me 20 years to realize how important this
| is.
| worik wrote:
| If you want to learn programming, from my point of view, learn C.
| goshx wrote:
| For programming, start by having a project. Think about something
| you'd like to build and focus on one thing at a time. This will
| guide your research.
|
| For Unix, install linux on your computer and use it daily. You'll
| be forced to learn.
| chipperyman573 wrote:
| >For Unix, install linux on your computer and use it daily.
| You'll be forced to learn.
|
| I tried this years ago and it didn't end well. With how
| complicated current-gen distros are, you need to understand
| what's going on under the hood before you can effectively mess
| with it. In my experience you'll just end up with one screen
| that's only at 720p and a crashed pulseaudio that you never fix
| because you just want to watch netflix right now, and for some
| reason that still works as long as you use bluethooth. Even
| though you didn't _want_ to use your bluetooth headphones, it
| 's easier than fixing the problem with your sound driver or
| whatever so you'll just end up using them anyway.
|
| It might be easier to start with server management because you
| don't have to figure out much human IO stuff... Linux is really
| good at talking to Linux. VPSs are cheap and give you root
| access. Plus if you mess up, it's generally pretty easy to just
| format the VPS and start over. You can't easily do the same on
| a desktop. Also it forces you to learn about Linux and not
| whatever software your distro uses (for example, learning how
| to use apt is a lot more important than the ubuntu app store)
| goshx wrote:
| I don't know how long ago you've tried it, but that was
| pretty much my experience as well. However, in my case we are
| talking late 90's. Things have changed a lot since then.
| chipperyman573 wrote:
| About 3-4 years ago. I disagree with most poeple that say
| it's just as easy as using w10 now, it takes way more work
| to make it as stable as windows (which takes none). It's
| just a lot more powerful and easy to modify when you want
| it to be.
|
| BTW if the OP (or anyone else) is wondering, now I run w10
| and minimal Ubuntu with i3. The knowledge transferred
| basically 1:1 from server management (except for window
| manager stuff, but that was easy to research)
| starpilot wrote:
| Use Slackware, do these exercises:
|
| - Customize your bash prompt, create aliases for some common
| commans (ls, df are good)
|
| - Build a LAMP stack, compile everything from source tarballs.
| Get it working so that you're able to browse your webserver from
| your phone.
|
| - Update a sound or video driver
|
| - After you're comfortable, recompile the kernel
|
| - Through these, do as much in the command line as you can. Get
| comfortable with mv rm chmod chown and so on.
|
| Any time you have edit a text file, use vim, nothing else.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| If you are on Windows I recommend setting up Windows Subsystem
| for Linux. With VScode. You now have a Linux server with remote
| code editing. I note you have an Raspberry pi, what follows will
| work with the pi as well with whatever remote machine. Complete
| these tasks
|
| 1) install the language of your choice and start a simple web
| site using the languages webserver. View the website in your
| browser on Windows. A Python Flask 'hello world' or a Node one?
|
| 2) Set up an SSH server and remote in from the Windows machine.
| Learn how to set it up to use keys only instead of passwords.
| Find out why that is a good idea
|
| 3) learn Git. Github has some nice tutorials.
|
| 4) set up NGinx to run your website above.
|
| 5) set up Nginx for https
|
| 6) set up LetsEncrypt.
|
| 7) set up a free AWS account, start a server and put your website
| on it using SSH and git.
|
| 8) look through the ssh log files to see login attempts, and the
| Nginx logs. Imagine there were millions of rows, how would you
| find a certain one, or the last few? (head, tail, grep, cat).
|
| That should get you somewhere.!
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| a really good book is Richard Stevens Advanced Programming in the
| UNIX environment[1]. (sounds daunting but it's not too bad when
| you combine it with another introductory text on C). If you stick
| with C you'll eventually know UNIX/Linux a lot deeper than
| anyone. It takes time though so go easy on yourself.
|
| Also check github for a bunch of repos that contain biolerplate
| code that is used in most deamons illustrating signal handling,
| forking, etc.[2]
|
| Also I suggest taking some open source projects from Daniel
| Bernstein (DJB) as examples on how to write secure code. qmail,
| djbdns, daemontools ... there are lots of great ideas there[3]
|
| Write a couple of simple programs that utilize your code and
| expand from there, learn the plumbing, e.g. write a Makefile,
| learn autotools/autoconf, how to write tests, how to use gdb, how
| to create shared libs and link a program
| LD_LIBRARY_PATH/ldconfig, etc ...
|
| Most important think about something that you like to write and
| go from there. Back in the late 90ies I studied RFC's (MIME,
| SMTP, etc) and then implemented things that I could actually use
| myself. Here is a recent project I did some weeks ago (an extreme
| edge-case for security maximalists which will never be used by
| anyone other then myself, ... but I really enjoyed writing this
| and learned a bunch of new stuff while doing so)[4]
|
| if you need ideas or help with looking at your code, don't
| hesitate and send me a mail.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Programming_in_the_Un...
|
| [2] https://github.com/jirihnidek/daemon
|
| [3] https://cr.yp.to/djb.html
|
| [4] https://github.com/DyslexicAtheist/nfq/
| westurner wrote:
| > _Also check github for a bunch of repos that contain
| biolerplate code that is used in most deamons illustrating
| signal handling, forking, etc.[2]_
|
| docker-systemctl-replacement is a (partial) reimplementation of
| systemd as one python script that can be run as the init
| process of a container that's helpful for understanding how
| systemd handles processes: https://github.com/gdraheim/docker-
| systemctl-replacement/blo...
|
| systemd is written in C: https://github.com/systemd/systemd
|
| > _examples of how to write secure code_
|
| awesome-safety-critical > Coding Guidelines
| https://github.com/stanislaw/awesome-safety-critical/blob/ma...
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