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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Can I hijack this to ask how best to 'learn Unix' (or Linux specifically, i confess I'm not actually sure on where the line is, my only non-Linux Unix experience is with Mac)?

I'd like to know more about namespaces, file organisation - what 'should' be where - processes and syscalls, etc.

(To be honest man pages just don't suit me for deliberate learning, I treat them the same as --help outputs, whereas for an answer to this question, for example, I'd find a textbook more helpful.)

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For Linux, specifically, I can recommend the O'Reilly book "Linux in a nutshell". Now in its sixth edition, I have been recommending it for years and it's still my go-to book.

You learn it a little at a time as you need it. man pages are great. Did you know that there are different man pages? `man 3’ for example, are the programming man pages, mostly documenting the C libraries. There’s also the `info’ pages (or pinfo if you like vi key bindings). And `apropos’ to help you find help.

Anyway, you don’t learn it before you start using it. The more you use the command line, the more you’ll find out that what you’re trying to do is easier or more scriptable there (with personal exceptions, like, I use a GUI file manager). You learn it as you need it.

Maybe I should have been more specific - I'm pretty comfortable on the command line, I use Arch, i3wm, pretty few GUIs.

I just feel there's a lot I don't know still, and is like to pick some more up preemptively rather than waiting until I need it and somehow guessing it does exist, or asking the right question to discover them as an answer.

Man pages are great when I want to know how to use something specific. I'm asking more for a textbook I can read cover to cover, and discover things I didn't know much or anything about, or hadn't thought to use.

Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen A. Rago.

As for the "file organisation", here is the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard.

There is also a lot of mention of "file organisation" in the book.

What’s weird is if I think about how I would learn C all over again, I know exactly what I would do. If I had to learn networking all over again, I would know what to do.

But Linux? I wouldn’t really know where to start. Maybe some old 80’s UNIX books. Out of newer books maybe one by Sobell or some of the O’reilly books. I think I tried learning from the “Unleashed” and SAMS books, which aren’t great.

There’s two things to learn. The technical aspect and all the commands. And then, perhaps more importantly, is the “UNIX philosophy”. I’ve seen too many systems administered and scripts setup like they were Windows systems.

The worst way to learn is by googling questions and topics, then reading the first page of search results which seem to be the same regurgitated cut and paste crap from the big “Linux admin” websites.

Also learned a bit from the SAMS book, but can't recommend it

The AWK programming language, the Unix Programming Environment and the Oreilly Perl Books. For everything else, any serious distro provides specific man pages and handbooks.

* https://linuxjourney.com/ for a nice overview

* https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course/blob/mast... - my collection of resources, mostly for command line and bash scripting

* https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/index.html linux kernel and its insides

Thanks - the 'journeyman' and 'networking nomad' sections of Linux Journey seem the sort of thing I'm looking for, if only they were a bit more in-depth.

If you want to really dive in you might want to check out linux from scratch. Or possibly arch linux which is a usable bleeding edge distribution that will require you to understand how to do the basics of maintaining your system.

Arch really clues you into how things work when you are used to point and click installs.

I do use Arch, suppose I ruined that joke by not mentioning it up front!

I found installing and using gentoo as my primary desktop to be a great learning experience. Linux From Scratch is often recommended, but is a significant jump higher in complexity.

I learned a ton from the first 6 chapters of "How Linux works: what every super user should know", 2nd edition.

A 3rd edition is coming out on March 2021.

"The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" is a great book I highly recommend.

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