Section 1.1. What You Will Learn

1.1. What You Will Learn

Some basic shell commands are described in this chapter, especially those related to some common programming tasks. Used as a toolkit, they can be a handy collection of tools for everyday use.

Linux provides an incredible array of such tools, useful for any development effort, Java or otherwise. They will be important not only for the development of your Java code, but for all the hundreds of related housekeeping tasks associated with programming and with managing your development environment. A few tools are described briefly in this chapter, to hint at what can be done and to whet your appetite for more.

We will also describe a command which will help you learn about other commands. Even so, it may be quite worth your while to have another book about UNIX/Linux handy. If there is something you, as a programmer, need to do on a Linux system, chances are there is already a command (or a sequence of commands) which will do it.

Finally, we will discuss the extent of our remaining ignorance upon finishing the chapter.

Let us take a moment to explain that last comment. As readers of computer books ourselves, we are often frustrated when we discover how lightly a topic has been covered, but particularly so when other parts of the same book are found to fully explore their topics. When only some parts of a book are thorough, you often don't know that you don't know it all. We will introduce some basic shell concepts and commands here, and we may expand on some of these in later chapters, but each of our chapters covers topics that could each fill its own book. Therefore we need to leave out lots of material. We will also let you know when we have left things out because they are off-topic, or because we don't have room. We'll also try to tell you where to look for the rest of the knowledge. We try to sum this up in a final section of each chapter entitled What You Still Don't Know. But we do have a lot of information to impart, so let's get going.