Philosophy


Plenty of books teach Unix theory, covering a single subject like Unix itself, the Bash shell, shell scripting, the vim or emacs text editor, the awk text-processing language, the Apache Web server, networking, firewalls, and so on. That's a lot of books, a lot of reading, and a lot of theory. Ninety percent of you don't have the inclination or time to follow that route. You learn on demand and want to cut to the chase to get a specific job done. You want to focus on the micro-topic that solves your current problem or gives you the knowledge to work out your own solution. Moreover, because most solutions involve more than a single command, you want to know the relevant techniques, technologies, and commands, and how to use them in combination.

These considerations lead to the book's approach. For 101 of the most common tasks, it explores the most appropriate commands and shows you how to use and combine them in the context of the task. This is different from the traditional theory approach, which considers a command in its own right and then asks, "What can I do with this command?"

The book uses a 90:10 philosophy. Ninety percent of the usefulness of a tool or technology lies in just 10 percent of its functionality. awk (a text-processing language) is a good examplevery powerful and commonly used, but rarely stretched beyond its 10 percent headline functionality. By taking the 90:10 approach, we combine 10 books in one; illustrate a broad range of topics that you'll encounter every day; and show techniques used in combination, not isolation.




Mac OS X UNIX 101 Byte-Sized Projects
Mac OS X Unix 101 Byte-Sized Projects
ISBN: 0321374118
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 153
Authors: Adrian Mayo

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