Michael A. Stone writes:
> > Actually - any suggestions for getting up to speed on UNIX-speak *greatly*
> > appreciated. This from someone who uses her shell account and that's about
> > all.
>
> the books suggested by other folks are good, but you can't really be a true
> unix geek without a copy of _The Unix Hater's Handbook_. the foreward by
> Dennis Ritchie, which is somthing like two pages of eloquent and eriudite
> prose.. and can be reduced very literally to the words "eat **** and die"..
> shows the kind of humor that's built into the thing at its very core.
Not to mention that the cover image is the impressionist painting
"The Scream":-). This stuff is more cultulral than technical. Hm, in
fact I wonder if there's any good book out there that brings together
the topics of Unix history, design philosophy, culture, etc, without
getting too technical. Not to mention that all of this is tied into
the Internet culture, the open source movement/culture/politics, the
hacker (real hacker, not cracker) culture, etc. You can learn a lot
about the big picture and context this way. Hm... anybody know of
such a book? Maybe I should write one :-).
My personal recommendation is "The Jargon File", published in
print as "The New Hacker's Dictionary" form MIT Press. Pick it up,
read the appendices, which are most prose oriented, and when you come
across some hacker-speak look it up. Actually, it can be kind of fun
just to skim around the file, following the links between entries.
Actually, I wasn't terribly impressed by the Unix Hater's
Handbook, from any sort of informational perspective, but it did look
like an easy and perhaps entertaining read. I skimmed it but as never
sufficiently interested to actually read it in the 1.5 years it sat in
the cubicle next to mine. The PC afficionado who bought it never did
quite get the idea... my favorite chapter was the "Unix is a virus
with a user interface" chapter, although the logic is certainly
applicable to Windows as well.
> there's a very strong cultural component to unix.. there are a hundred
> (at barest minimum) different text editors out there, but if you don't know
> vi or emacs you'll be branded as a luser. worst of all is the sin of
True. They're at opposite ends of the spectrum; vi is small and
light and limited, but ubiquitous - it's on every system by default.
Emacs, on the other hand, is large, complex, incredibly powerful and
used to be harder to find. These days it's becoming far more common as
bundled packages and in general is easier to install (not for
non-techies, but at least it's not a porting nightmare for Solaris,
for example).
Pico was created as a sort of moderate version of emacs - in fact
most of the line-editing control-keys are the default control-keys in
emacs. From that perspective, pico is quite reaasonable. I'd
recomend starting with pico, then after you're comfortable, trying out
emacs.
I also recommend learning the vi basics, since vi is the editor
you can count on being on pretty much every Unix system. The biggest
stumbling block is the "modal " nature of the vi interface. You're
either in insert mode or you're in edit mode, and there's no visible
indicator of which, and you switch *out* of insert mode by pressing the
escape key, but you switch *in* by pressing "i" or "a" (insert or
append). Get a vi cheat-sheet and work with it for an hour or two,
then keep the cheatsheet around for when you need it.
> dive in and work out as much as you can on your own, disdaining no
> source of possible information, but also talk to the other people
> who live & work there. ask questions, let everyone know how proud
> you are of *finally* having mastered some basic skill, and generally
> make noise. we've all done the same, and we all know how fragile
> and limited our own current level of knowledge really is. to truly
> understand unix, you have to learn to be a six-month newbie talking
> to the five- and ten-year newbies.
Indeed. I think the important thing to realize is that, aside
from the usual negatively maladjusted oddballs you'll find in any
group (but, I feel, in a much smaller proportion in this group, and
compensated for by the positively maladjusted oddballs :-), most
people in the Unix culture will be quite helpful - as long as they
know you're making an honest effort to figure it out yourself!
It's a sort of a "do-it-yourself-er" kinda thing. They've done
it, they know what it's like, as long as they can see you're trying,
they're willing to help you with the rough spots, but not to
spoon-feed you. A genuine fascination with technology elp,s but that
can't be faked. What you can do is cultivate an openness and a focus
on how it all fits together, rather than on specific end goals when
learning.
This will be complicated, of course, by the fact that it's a
complex technology with lots of dependencies and "terms-to-describe-
the-terms" situations. Most knowledge domain experts won't be as
useful as they could be, unless they've developed good metaphors
through experience or acquired them somewhere.
> welcome.. share and enjoy.
...indeed, and buckle your seatbelt, you're in for a ride :-)
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
p.s.
Here's a suggestion: pick up an extra PC at work and/or home (you
can do this fairly cheaply since it doesn't need to be a powerful PC,
and if you get some switch-boxes you can use your regular PC's
peripherals (keyboard, mouse, screen) with both). Install Linux and
get some good books on it. Try to do as much as you can in Linux, but
keep your regular PC around for when getting it done takes priority
over learning.
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