Shots W. Jr. The Linux Command Line

San Francisco: A LinuxCommand.org Book, 2013. — 537 p.This book is a broad overview of living on the Linux command line. Unlike some books that concentrate on just a single program, such as the shell program, bash, this book will try to convey how to get along with the command line interface in a larger sense. How does it all work? What can it do? What's the best way to use it?
This is not a book about Linux system administration. While any serious discussion of the command line will invariably lead to system administration topics, this book only touches on a few administration issues. It will, however, prepare the reader for additional study by providing a solid foundation in the use of the command line, an essential tool for any serious system administration task.
This book is very Linux-centric. Many other books try to broaden their appeal by including other platforms such as generic Unix and OS X. In doing so, they water down their content to feature only general topics. This book, on the other hand, only covers contemporary Linux distributions. Ninety-five percent of the content is useful for users of other Unix-like systems, but this book is highly targeted at the modern Linux command line user.This material is presented in a carefully chosen sequence, much like a tutor sitting next to you guiding you along. Many authors treat this material in a systematic fashion, which makes sense from a writer’s perspective, but can be very confusing to new users.
Another goal is to acquaint you with the Unix way of thinking, which is different from the Windows way of thinking. Along the way, we'll go on a few side trips to help you understand why certain things work the way they do and how they got that way. Linux is not just a piece of software, it's also a small part of the larger Unix culture, which has its own language and history. I might throw in a rant or two, as well.
This book is divided into four parts, each covering some aspect of the command line experience:
– Learning The Shell starts our exploration of the basic language of the command line including such things as the structure of commands, file system navigation, command line editing, and finding help and documentation for commands.
– Configuration And The Environment covers editing configuration files that control the computer's operation from the command line.
– Common Tasks And Essential Tools explores many of the ordinary tasks that are commonly performed from the command line. Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, contain many classic command line programs that are used to perform powerful operations on data.
– Writing Shell Scripts introduces shell programming, an admittedly rudimentary, but easy to learn, technique for automating many common computing tasks. By learning shell programming, you will become familiar with concepts that can be applied to many other programming languages.