Ask HN: How can a intermediate-beginner learn Unix/Linux and programming?

I wrote a free book for getting started with the command line that may interest you: https://seankross.com/the-unix-workbench/

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.

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® 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

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.

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.