Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Book on Linux

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 22 posts

Re: A Book on Linux

#11

Post by trod123 »

There is no best book. The general recommendations vary depending on your background knowledge.

A very basic starting point would be linuxjourney.com.

It is also important to be aware that there are no guarantees that programs provide output that maintains determinism. This is important because computation often fundamentally breaks with violations of determinism.

ldd for example has several determinism errors in its output which breaks the required 1:1 unique input to unique output map property, as a result piping it to any program will result in non-deterministic outputs that break automation. * Note: PAX ended up fixing this properly in their repo package back in 2018 iirc, the ldd maintainers never accepted the changes upstream and its unfixed to this day.

Lower intermediate might be RHCSA material and tearing down existing distros by package and identifying functional blocks and implementation/integration details.

LFS is more upper intermediate, and requires some background knowledge of using freestanding code and their relevant toolchains, and common problems you might face in software compilation (i.e. circular dependencies, first/second pass libstd++).

Re: A Book on Linux

#13

Post by p1esk »

This was the book that explained everything I needed to know about Linux with very little noise: Beginning the Linux Command Line, by Sander van Vugt.

Today I would heavily supplement it with answers from GTP4o (or perhaps Sonnet 3.5).

Re: A Book on Linux

#14

Post by aquova »

thaumiel wrote: post #2

I have found that How Linux Works, 3rd Edition from No Starch Press is a pretty good book talking about linux for beginners.

I second this. A lot of books are either directed to complete beginners, stuff like how to update packages and use common applications, or directed toward kernel developers. How Linux Works covers useful items that will serve more hands on users well.

Re: A Book on Linux

#16

Post by nocman »

frithsun wrote: post #7

Unix Power Tools The Linux kernel doesn't matter. What matters is understanding the history, philosophy, and purpose of the unix environment. You needn't become a religious zealot committed to the unix philosophy, but if you don't take the time to understand it, you'll never get the most out of the environment.

>The Linux kernel doesn't matter.

While I agree on the importance of "the history, philosophy, and purpose of the unix environment", saying that the Linux kernel doesn't matter seems a bit harsh at best. It seems to me that the Linux kernel is the most successful Unix-like kernel in the history of computing. It certainly matters for its ubiquity alone.

Re: A Book on Linux

#18

Post by richrichie »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #9
frithsun wrote: post #7

Unix Power Tools The Linux kernel doesn't matter. What matters is understanding the history, philosophy, and purpose of the unix environment. You needn't become a religious zealot committed to the unix philosophy, but if you don't take the time to understand it, you'll never get the most out of the environment.

Similar but more historical, The Unix Programming Environment is a fun read, I learned a lot from it, and it's nice to have some historical context.

I love the flow of the book. Both Kernighan and Pike are great communicators.
Post reply on HN