Comments on: Book review: The Linux Command Line

By: Kostya Berger

Kostya Berger — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:30:16 +0000

TO: Will Backman
–Right, desktop space is NEVER ehough… but then it’s the best time for them to learn their keyboard shortcuts, he-he. At least, that is how I learned them, only recently, although actively using bash command line for years now.
It is SO MUCH easier to navigate between the open apps windows with Alt+Tab (GNOME) when they cover one another.
With keyboard control of things it is just pressing the same keys and getting the window you need, while with mouse it is doing a more complex muscle work, which disturbs my concentration and effects the typing.
My typing has improved these couple of weeks that I’ve been using kb shortcuts for everything, MUCH less wrong keys typed (almost none). This I couldn’t improve for years, never knowing the reason why.

…OK, just wanted to say that mastering one’s keyboard goes side by side with CLI work.
And generally, computers have improved a good deal since the days of DOS and all that, but in good many ways this progress has gone in a wrong direction. But that’s a long story…

And logically: you have 100+ keys of your keyboard, a complete operation panel, and yet need to use some additional device like mouse. And when you have to do a lot of typing mouse is distracting (for me at least). So I’d say keyboard shortcuts are kinda the same level knowledge as CLI.

By: Will Backman

Will Backman — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:16:15 +0000

It would have been better as a physical book, because it was hard for the students to have both the terminal and examples from the PDF on the screen at the same time. Not enough screen real estate.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:39:49 +0000

I didn’t realize it had been previously published that way. I’m the best investigative journalist ever.

In any case, I like having the physical book in hand; I find it very hard to sit and read electronic documents on my desktop for an extended period. It’s fine for “how do I fix this” sort of issues, but long reads are not pleasant. Or perhaps the rest of the Internet is too distracting.

By: Will Backman

Will Backman — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:41:06 +0000

I switched to this book last year for my Unix course. The students liked it, particularly the free download. The Author was happy to see it being used.

By: Micah

Micah — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 05:54:27 +0000

It’s worth pointing out that this fellow also has this book — maybe a slightly older edition — available under a Creative Commons license. According to his page (Linuxcommand.org), the No Starch Press version is just a reprint. Which is fine, since this version, when I looked at it, seemed to be just as good as Justin says the No Starch Press printed edition is.