I read a lot of technical papers and books. None are as fun as the comic-esque explainers from Wizardzines. Now, Julia Evans has put everything online, including incomplete comics and single topics such as Sort & Uniq
Wizardzines are wonderful little tutorials that don’t just make good references (or posters) but are more succinct than most technical books.
I suggest going all in for a hundred bucks. That gets you all of the completed comics like Bite Size Bash, which is just a lovely overview of a good chunk of Bash.
A terrific primer for getting familiar with Unix commands.
Craig Hockenberry has a lengthy post up about his favorite things in the Terminal. It’s so full of greatness it’s hard to pick one tip to highlight. I love this kind of thing because it’s helpful and it’s written in a unique voice.
The command line also responds to control keys. The ones I use the most are Control-A and Control-E to move to the beginning and end of the line.
Here’s some tips for file transfer over SSH. Piping through SSH is also useful for streaming output from a command on one machine to a different machine.
But the biggest shocker to me during my research was that the xkcd forums are actually pretty useful.
There is never a day that I’m not interested in terminal one-liners. Here’s a basic collection for today.
I think it’s by way of Dr. Bunsen
Nettuts does a really good job with these mini-tutorials. The latest about bash scripting is true to their record. What makes this one standout is the form. It starts with a premise and works through the increasing complexity step-wise.
It turns out that 90-99.5% of the candidates for a programming job are simply unable to write the simplest program. Imran took this simple Fizz-Buzz game and asked the candidates to solve it.
A nice outline of common unix tools for monitoring resources and processes.1
I originally drafted this post with a link to Nettuts. But it looks like they just ripped off the original. Kind of disappointing. It makes me skeptical of the rest of their work. ↩︎
I find myself using Checkvist more every day (Previous Post). I’m constantly surprised by how well it works. I’ve been happily using it for most of my outlining. Recently I started to use it as a sort of Inbox for everything that is not a task. This role was previously filled by Dropbox plain text files but I wanted to try something new to alleviate some problems associated with my large collection of notes.
I’m mostly just putting this here for my future-self to find when he forgets.
Hey, dummy. Set your host’s time zone offset by adding this line to your bash profile:
:::bash TZ="/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York"; export TZ You’re welcome.
Reference, in case you don’t believe me
I suck at sed. I can copy and paste though. Great resource.
