I Installed Linux

[Whack01]

Well I finally went and installed Linux (Fedora 7 x86_64). I've been meaning to do this for the last couple years, but kept putting it off. Install went off without a hitch and all my hardware worked fine right off the bat. However, I hit a snag when I was trying to set up my box for dual boot. I apparently had bought the "upgrade disk" for Windows XP and seeing as it's been over half a decade since w95, I no longer have the disk around . So for the next three months I'm going to be using solely Linux.

So far I'm enjoying myself, and being able to just type "yum install [program]" to install any program I could possibly want is just awesome . I'm hitting a few snags with bugs in the 64bit implementations of some programs, but switching to the i386 versions seems to resolve those ( but I dislike doing this, afraid it may make the upgrade harder next month).

Would anyone happen to know of a really good free bash/shell scripting resource? I found a number of manuals that looked interesting at The Linux Documentation Project but I don't know which are good until I've wasted time reading them.

I'm also considering buying some books, anybody got an opinion as to which of these two sets (or combination) I should get if I want to learn how to script & administrate?

O'Reilly
Learning the Bash Shell
Classic Shell Scripting
Essential System Administration

Apress
From Bash to zshell
Shell Scripting Recipes

and maybe: Automating Unix and Linux administration though that one is probably going to be overkill.

 

[skoob]

Would anyone happen to know of a really good free bash/shell scripting resource? I found a number of manuals that looked interesting at The Linux Documentation Project but I don't know which are good until I've wasted time reading them.

The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide has been helpful to me, but I'm not sure how good it is if you're not so familiar with the subject already. IMO, the LDP guides are in general pretty good, although some of them are a bit out of date.

I don't have any specific (dead tree) book recommendations, but O'Reilly don't publish bad books and most of them are excellent.

I wouldn't recommend spending too much time learning the intricacies of Bash scripting. While Bash is more or less the standard on GNU/Linux, if you want real portability POSIX scripting is the only way to go (Bash is a superset of POSIX shell). If you don't need that kind of portability, just use your favourite scripting language (Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl or whatever). It's a lot nicer to work with and less error-prone than dealing with all the weirdities of shell scripting. Bash is great for throw-away one-liners, but for anything longer than a couple of lines, I prefer using Python.

Of course, scripting is just the glue that ties stuff together. If you want to learn how to do stuff in *nix, you need to learn all about all of the wonderful *nix commands like grep, sed, awk and all of the others.