Who is This Book For?

You’ll get the most out of this book if you’re motivated to work in that magical way, and are ready to improve the way you use your development environment to that end, but didn’t yet put in a lot of time towards getting there. You’re ready to jump in with both feet – this book is your diving board. You’re in the right place.

Maybe you are motivated, but don’t have the time to pore through all the man pages and years of forum posts to figure it all out. You can expect some quick wins and techniques you can implement right away, as well as warning signs on time-sinks to avoid. This will be your cookbook.

But maybe you’re on the fence about whether spending time on improving your devenv is worth it. Again, the quick wins and time-sink warning signs should be useful. But more importantly, you’ll also be able to get a feel for the journey – if you get a taste for it, you can always dive deeper. If not, take the quick wins. Either way, I’m happy for you.

Or maybe you already went down the rabbit hole, and write Elisp code to make Emacs send birthday reminders to your family using the MTA you run on your VPS. For you, this book may help you organize your knowledge. It may point out blind spots, open new avenues of research, show new perspectives and approaches.

What Technologies are Covered?

I must also mention what technologies you can expect to see here. The biggest divide is across the axis of operating systems. The primary focus of the content is Linux, and macOS (you may know it as OSX). With minor exceptions, the same techniques and technologies apply to BSD as well – but if you’re using BSD, I don’t need to tell you where that breaks down.

If you develop on Windows, and for Windows, and you’ll only ever touch Windows, then I’ll be straight with you: there will be biggish chunks of content not directly applicable to your environment. You’ll still learn some ways of thinking that you can apply, and get ideas on what to start looking for, but much of the hands-on content will be irrelevant. In case you’re wondering, yes, I’m open and totally willing to add that Windows-specific content you were about to send to abesto0@gmail.com.