[FM Discuss] Review of "Introduction to the command line" book

[Mick]

Hi there Jaysinh,

Thanks so much for this review. I'll copy and paste it below for others
to read.

Thanks also for making a correction. I think this would be a good chance
to test out and document our new (more manual) publishing workflow for
pdf and epubs.

I also noticed that book isn't on our front page! So a greater incentive.

Thanks
Mick



On 03/03/17 07:09, Jaysinh Shukla wrote:
> Respected members,
>
>     I read the book "Introduction to the Command line" written by this
> community. I would like to congratulate for noble efforts by this
> community. I would be happy to read such good books in upcoming
> months. I have blogged book review after reading this book here
> http://blog.jaysinh.com/book/review/2017/02/28/book-review-introduction-to-the-commandline.html
> . Hope this review will help. Many thanks!


  Book review 'Introduction to the Command Line'

Feb 28, 2017

introduction_to_command_line


    tl;dr

Every chapter will introduce a bunch of comands and will point to its
respective documentation for further learning. You should expect
chapters describing from the grep
<https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.html> command to GNU
Octave <https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/> which is a scientific
programming language. The chapters are independent of each other. The
book is must read if you are new to the GNU/Linux
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux> command line. If you are at the
intermediate level, then too investing time in reading this book will
unveil a few surprises for you.


    Detailed review

The book is community driven and published under FLOSS Manual
<http://flossmanuals.net/>. It is a collaborative effort of the FSF
<http://www.fsf.org/>community. The fun part is you can contribute to 
this book by adding new chapters or by improving an existing one. I
fixed one typo in this book after reading. The best introduction is
crafted comparing GUI based image editing tools with the most unknown
command convert <https://linux.die.net/man/1/convert>. It conveys the
importance of command line well to the reader. Initial chapters will
present the overview of various GNU/bash
<https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/>commands. From my personal
experience, you have to use mentioned commands in this chapter daily.
The chapter of Command history shortcuts depicts geeky shell patterns. I
will advise not to skip that chapter and read through once. The advanced
section was not much advance for me. It demonstratesssh
<https://linux.die.net/man/1/ssh> and related commands like scp
<https://linux.die.net/man/1/scp> and more. I appreciated the preference
of using GNU Screen <https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/> though I
use tmux <https://tmux.github.io/> over it. If you are possessed by
moving around on multiple directories simultaneously, then *directory
stacks* under *Moving Again* section is worth scanning. This
functionality is saving dozens of my keystrokes now. There is one entire
division dedicated to various editors. That section is not limited
to GNU Emacs <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/> or vim
<http://vim.org/>, but also briefs GNU NANO
<https://www.nano-editor.org/>, Kedit <http://www.kedit.com/> and Gedit
<https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit>. This section does not compare the
pros and cons of several editors, but describes basics of each which
should be counted as a good part. I skipped this part because I am
comfortable with vim <http://vim.org/> editor at present and don’t want
to invest much in others.

The scripting section turned out to be the most interesting division for
me. Though I was aware about the tools like sed
<https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html> and language awk
<https://linux.die.net/man/1/awk> I was not using them often. Reading
their chapters and implementing mentioned examples built little
confidence in me. Now I am much comfortable in utilizing them. The
irregular *Regular expressions* are everywhere. You should not pass over
this section and pay careful attention to various examples. It is worth
to invest your time in this segment.

This is not the ending. This book presents a glimpse of various
scripting level programming languages like Perl
<https://www.perl.org/>, Python <http://python.org/> and Ruby
<https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/>. Because I am a python developer for a
few years and I was not much interested in other languages, I skipped
this section. A shallow introduction to GNU Octave
<https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/> is nice to study if you are
interested in knowing a little about this scientific programming language.


      How to read this book?

Do not read to read. This book contains nice shell examples. By merely
reading, you will end up without bringing about anything meaningful. I
will advise you to interpret the description first, observe the examples
and then implement them on your own. If you have any confusions, read
the example and description again or obtain help
from |man| or |info| are the best options. To remember, I revised the
important chapters more than once in a week. It helped me to refresh
what I learned before. I will attempt to re-read the important sections
once again after a few days to refresh my memory.


      What is missing?

Considerably, the book is nicely written, equally distributed and
largely acceptable, but I would prefer to have a small set exercises
section at the end of each topic. Exercise might help the reader to
identify their weak points early and refer on them again if they desire to.


      Typo / Mistakes

I didn’t encounter any sever mistakes except one typo. The section
of *Userful customizations* on page number 80 of my printed version,
contains following example:

|function manyargs { $arg=$1 shift ... } |

Here, *$arg* is a misprint. A shell variable is never assigned with *$*.
It should be |args=$1|. I myself has corrected the typographical error
in the book. This change will be published maybe in the next release of
this book.

If you are encountering any mistakes while reading, I request you to fix
the change here
<http://write.flossmanuals.net/command-line/introduction/>. The
interface for editing the book is beginner friendly. It took less than 5
minutes to drive the change.


      Where to buy/download?

  *

    Buy printed version
    <https://shop.fsf.org/books-docs/introduction-command-line>.

  *

    Read Online <http://write.flossmanuals.net/command-line/introduction/>.

  *

    Download PDF
    <http://archive.flossmanuals.net/_booki/command-line/command-line.pdf>



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