The Hacker Ways
The Hacker Ways
A gentle introduction to the command line and the UNIX toolset.
About the Book
There is a better way to deal with computers. Hackers have been developing and using it for at least 40 years: it is the way of the command line, of the conversation with the computer in languages that are neither human nor machine, but a carefully crafted middle ground. Hackers, by the way, is how we call people who know well their tools, who dare to explore, and who need to build things.
If you want to use the computer to solve problems and you are not comfortable in a UNIX command line environment you will benefit from this book: it will take you to a level of understanding from which you'll be able to move forward, a first but solid stepping stone in the way to profficiency with the tools of the hackers. Having a firm grasp of the tools and the ways of working on the command line will make you more efficient, more productive, and able to tackle more challenging problems.
The Hacker Ways will teach you all you need to know to get started. You'll learn how the command line works, and you'll understand its logic; you'll learn to edit files in Vi and Emacs, the two classic text editors; you'll learn about programming, you'll write your first programs. You'll learn tools to do math and data analysis. And you'll start playing with it all, which is the key to real learning.
I wrote most of the contents of this book in order to introduce a smart and motivated audience (my two sons) to the world of the command line, the classic editors, and the basics of programming. It has already achived its first objective. I would be very glad if it could help you as well.
About the Author
Table of Contents
-
§1 — Introduction
- Why this book
- The UNIX tools and environment
- The development process
- The Way of the Future
-
§2 — The way of the terminal
- A note on following this book
- The directory structure
- Listing the contents of a directory
- Asking for help
- Creating a directory
- Everything is text
- A conversation with the computer
- Building and manipulating files
- Copying and moving
- Deleting
- Multiple names for files
- Wildcards
- Completion
- Command line history
- Clean up
-
§3 — Basic UNIX tools
- Bring in some content
-
Bundling files with
tar -
Finding files with
find - Looking for differences between files
- Find text in files
- Finding words in files of a particular type
- Looking for help
-
§4 — The way of the editor
- Editing with Vi
- Editing with Emacs
- Programs are text files —and documents can be as well
- Why bother
-
§5 — From the shell to a program
- Our first program
- Running the program
- Program permissions
- Variables in the shell
- Sourcing scripts
- Environment variables
- Initializing environment variables
- Conditionals in the shell
- Looping the shell
- Programming and the shell
-
§6 — Speaking Python
- Running Python
- Functions in Python
- Variables in Python
- Defining your own functions
-
Exit Python: the end of file,
C-d - Writing a Python program
- Command line arguments for your Python program
- The shebang
- Programming Python
- Compiled languages and interpreted languages
-
§7 — Making the computer work for you
- The case for improving your work environment
-
Running things in parallel with
screen -
A remote server running
screen - Python packages
-
Installing Python packages with
pip - Improve your Python environment with IPython
- Asking for help in Python
- Playing with Python and math
- Solve equations and plot graphs
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