Comment by zedshaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zedshaw | Hacker News Reader

Well, pleasant surprise people are finding this book. Heads up, it'll be getting a little update soon so that it matches the version that is now an appendix in Learn Python The Hard Way. I stripped out a few commands that weren't as useful and also added some more help on what to do when you get stuck (what I call the "reset"). Check out http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/appendixa.html for the newer streamlined content.

In general I found these 14 commands end up being the smallest number anyone really needs to do basic CLI work, but keep in mind that the goal of the book is to give someone just enough experience to be able to go through my other books. There are plenty of more in-depth books on managing a server, so I don't bother to duplicate their work.

If you really want to learn how to manage servers and work the CLI, then check out "UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th Edition)" by Evi Nemeth and friends. My recommendation to people is to get a crappy computer you don't want, put OpenBSD on it following their http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html guide exactly, use the Nemeth book to configure every service you can and then point a security scanner at your box (like Nessus, or whatever they use today).

Once you can setup an OpenBSD box, get services running on them, and secure those services based on known attacks, then you can pretty much do anything. More importantly, OpenBSD is very bare bones so you learn the core of how a Unix system works and how to configure it, but their docs are very thorough and complete so you can do it if you follow them accurately.

Hope that all helps.

> In general I found these 14 commands end up being the smallest number anyone really needs to do basic CLI work..

What should an advanced user know? Everything provided by coreutils, stuff that goes in /bin etc? Also sed, awk and common tools for simple text processing?

I think there are several valid definitions for "advanced" in this context. While basic awk/sed knowledge is certainly useful -- if you can do the same thing in python/ruby/perl that might be fine.

Knowing a little bit about writing valid ksh/bash shell scripts (being at least aware of bash-isms) would certainly be useful for sys adm work.

My opinion is that the full gnu (and/or bsd) userland has grown so large over the years, that saying that you should know it all is probably overkill -- but knowing how to look things up (man, info) is a must.

As Zed's implied -- GNU documentation could stand to be improved vs bsd man pages -- although the info manuals can be quite useful.

After these commands I don't think learning a ton of more commands makes you better at working a computer. After this, sitting down to actually setup a working Unix box and then hardening it will teach you a crazy number of commands and things. More importantly it'll teach what all those little processes and services do on the computer.

However, I will say that learning how to effectively use grep and sed are probably the only big omissions from my list. But, those are outside the scope of this little book given those commands have whole books devoted to them.

Well said! Its probably the tinkering that eventually teach people that something that is in coreutils is worth looking into.

I can't recommend "UNIX and Linux System Administrator Handbook" enough it has definitely helped my burgeoning career as a sysadmin. Also I've learned tremendously from zed's C, Ruby, and Python. Thanks Zed for putting all of that together. Lastly RIP Evi Nemeth, so many Sysadmins are greatly indebted to your gifts.

Do you think the same benefit could be had from doing it on EC2, or is installing OpenBSD locally from a CD-ROM essential to your suggestion?

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