How to Use This Book
You can use Windows, Linux, or macOS to follow along with the activities and exercises in this book—as long as you run a Bash shell. Thankfully, that’s the default on macOS and most Linux variants, and you can set up Bash on Windows 10. However, you may want to use VirtualBox[2] to install the Ubuntu operating system and use that instead.
Using VirtualBox, you can run the commands in this book without worrying about doing anything to harm your computer, and you can take snapshots of your virtualized environment which you can revert if something goes wrong while you’re working on the exercises in this book. You’ll also avoid inconsistencies between the various operating systems while you’re learning. Chapter 2, Creating an Ubuntu Virtual Machine with VirtualBox, explains this in more detail and walks you through setting this up.
Throughout the book, you’ll see commands and output. Commands you’ll type will look like this:
| | $ echo hello > hello.txt |
The dollar sign ($) represents the prompt from the Bash shell session. You won’t type it when you type the command. It just denotes that this is a command you should type.
Occasionally, you’ll see a series of commands. The dollar sign prompts let you see what you should type, and the rest is output from the program:
| | $ ls -l |
| | total 36 |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 11:59 Desktop |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 11:59 Documents |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 11:59 Downloads |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 11:59 Music |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 11:59 Pictures |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 11:59 Public |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 15:48 sharptools |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 11:59 Templates |
| | drwxr-xr-x 2 brian brian 4096 Mar 2 11:59 Videos |
| | $ mkdir Code |
| | $ cd Code |
Additionally, sometimes you’ll see commands that span multiple lines, like this:
| | $ cat << 'EOF' > hello.txt |
| | > Hello |
| | > World |
| | > EOF |
The > symbol indicates that the command continues on that line. You’ll see the > character in your shell whenever it’s waiting for you to continue typing. You won’t type that character either.
Finally, each chapter has some exercises for you to try, so you can practice what you learned. In addition, each chapter assumes you have experience with the content in the previous chapter. Feel free to jump around and explore, but don’t go so fast that you don’t get some practice time in. The commands in this book will help you be more productive, but only once you’ve practiced them enough so they’re second nature.