How to Read This Book

While you can certainly read most of this book on an e-book reader, there are a lot of code snippets and screenshots that are going to be way less colorful. You’ll definitely want to check at least those parts out on your computer. Ideally on the one where you’re tweaking your development environment, for easy copy-pasting of snippets. Going further, I strongly encourage you to download the PDF version for reading on a computer. While easy to quickly check something out, reading online (with the LeanPub app)

will not serve you well.

I encourage you to read the next chapter, “Appetizer”, straight through. It introduces some basic concepts, and provides a taste for the kind of wins you can get by tweaking your environment.

For the “Main course”, reading back to front is perfectly fine as well. Some sections build on each other – for instance, we evaluate terminal emulators first, then talk about choosing a shell to run in that terminal emulator. If any of the sections are not relevant for you, or if one of them seem especially exciting, feel free to skip around. You won’t miss anything. If you do jump around, make sure to check out the two Interludes – they provide ways of working that are useful across any part of your development environment.

“Dessert” contains deep dives, tips, and extra-geeky ideas you can try out. Who knows, maybe some of them will click for you. There’s little to no connection between the topics covered here, feel free to choose and pick the ones that look exciting. You may still want to skim through them all, just to get a picture of what’s out there.