Linux Basics for Hackers (2019)
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Even if you're a seasoned Linux user you will learn a lot from those books.
The "Efficient" book is an in depth walkthrough of the shell and how to reason and combine important commands to perform not trivial tasks. It is certainly a book to be re-read from time to time because it has plenty of good tricks and explanations.
"The Linux Command Line" by William Shotts is pretty good book for new and experienced command line users. He has also written the supplemental book "Adventures with the Linux Command Line". The author has also generously provided them for free download at https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php.
One big issue for me is that when I use Linux I only use it for a specific purpose, e.g. hacking kernels, and the cli commands are extremely limited. I have been using a Linux box for a year and haven’t learned much TBH.
Another thing that helped me learn a lot was what I call "anime playlist management", but may be too niche to recommend. Basically after I moved from VLC to mpv I had to create and add to playlists without a gui. I learned a lot about the find command, text redirection, vim, fzf, file permissions... I retrieve the full file path for the videos and dump that into a .m3u file that I then watch in mpv or rearrange later in vim. find helps to get to the exact files quicker even when everything is sorted neatly into separate directories, fzf lets you add multiple files from the find output at once, selectively. find can also filter by mtime, so I have some one-liners that just show e.g. all files 7 days old or newer in the media directory, easy to rerun and select the stuff I just downloaded to put in the playlist.
At some point I preferred vim over geany or whatever other text editor I used to use. It's nice to be able to use the same tools everywhere, including over ssh, so that reinforced a preference for stuff that runs in a terminal. irssi, aerc, stig+transmission-daemon, neovim, mpv (controllable over ssh). Also having a file server gets you more into rsync, sshfs, stuff like that.
I've made several vim macros to speed up the "anime workflow" as well. Like I add new episodes to the very bottom of the file, but the file has sections broken up by empty lines, and I have a macro to take everything just added at the bottom and move it to the bottom of the top section, where the high priority stuff goes. I also have macros to delete the top line of two side-by-side files in vim at once, saving both. I have both a human-readable list and the actual playlist file and then I delete the lines as I watch.
I've been incrementally refining this workflow for several years now. Just find something you enjoy doing and try to polish it, learn more applicable tools you can incorporate, etc.
This seems to have been the gateway to systems administration for a surprisingly large number of contemporary young people - just like IRC, Quake and Counterstrike servers in my teen years, and futzing with config.sys & autoexec.bat for DOS games when I was a kid... And the hacking soon becomes more fun than the game itself !
Adobe fixes PDF zero-day security bug that hackers have exploited for months
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/adobe-fixes-pdf-zero-day-security-bug-that-hackers-have-exploited-for-months/If you see litter on the ground already, that doesn't make it OK to litter more.
The better, IMO, analogy, is if you have an ad glued somewhere, say at a bus stop. Another person comes with their ad and wants to glue it. They glue it over the previous ad. The amount of ads visible remains the same. There's a negligible disadvantage for the city - they have to haul away twice as many paper. But most importantly, the amount of visual clutter hasn't been increased if the second ad is glued over the first one.
That analogy works if you're against piracy and ads on public places, of course.
It would be better if you just embrace the fact that you're unwilling to pay for creative effort and OK depriving creators of money - that isn't my ethos but it's at least honest and consistent.
Arguing that piracy doesn't hurt someone is trivially wrong, lazy, and self-centered.
This isn't even abandonware. If you don't want to buy the book, go to a library or read a publicly accessible blog, but piracy is bullshit full stop.
Did the stars ask your payment for their light?
Did the sun ask you for payment for its warmth?
Did the Earth ask you for payment for your life?
The knowledge that allowed you to flourish was paid in blood by our ancestors for millions of years.
Knowledge is shared freely. It is not piracy to learn, but it is tyranny to restrict it.
Not everyone lives in rich Western countries with cushy Silicon Valley pay grades; lots of folks are young, studying; they may be temporarily underemployed, or simply have to prioritise other costs.
Knowledge is a right, not the privilege of a moneyed minority.
If you're prioritizing other costs, then prioritize those. You don't have an inherent right to consume everything in history.
I am one of the book industry's better customers. This is pretty typical, AFAIUI. We see study after study suggest that pirates spend more on music and film than non-pirates.[1] Just the other week, I bought a physical copy of a book I'd first read from LibGen.
I pirate when I'm broke, or when living somewhere where certain books are hard to come by, as I did for a good 15-20 years of my life.
I have zero qualms about anything I've pirated. Not because of my prior "support" to authors, but because I'm aware most people in the world cannot afford to spend 65 dollars (plus postage) on a book.
Let me invert your claim on rights. What right do US lawyers have to deprive the majority of reading? Why should only the wealthy be able to access quality material on Linux? There is a particular irony in your gatekeeping of knowledge on an operating system which is designed to be free and accessible for all.
Imagine a world in which there was no Libgen, or Anna's Archive, or people sharing PDFs on forums. Would this be a better world? These things exist today, authors still get paid. In a world without, we'd have worse engineers, dumber people.
Frankly, I wish book piracy was much more mainstream. I'd much rather everyone was sat down of an evening with a copy of Linux Basics for Hackers, or The Leopard, or God-help-me, even Harry-chuffing-Potter, than doom-scrolling bile on their social media platform of choice.
Piracy is, all told, globally, a service to humanity, and we'd be better off with more of it.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/study-again-shows-pirates-te..., https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/06/piracy-fi...
That, and the Anarchist Cookbook..