As you may or may not know, I’m in love with Linux. It’s been a fascination of mine since I was in high school, which was the mid to late 90s. I’ve installed numerous distros, over and over again; on desktops, laptops, chromebooks, and virtual machines. Now, I’m by no means a master with Linux. There’s still a lot that I need to learn. But I do feel like I know my fare share. So now my goal in between learning Python is to flesh out the areas I’m not to familiar with.
With that in mind, I stumbled across a humble bundle package with about 17 different Unix related books. All of them seem to be pretty relevant to my goal, particularly the Sed & Awk book, which will also be my primary focus to master those tools. As a side note, I needed to copy a few fields from a CSV file the other day at work and hoped to use some command line tools to speed up the process. I ended up using cut command to perform the task, though I read that it’s also possible to perform the same actions with Awk as well, which really piqued my interest. In all my years of working with Linux, I’ve heard of awk but never really given it much thought. So now I’m setting out to change that.
My long term goal will be to land a job as a jr system administrator or jr system engineer somewhere. So anything I can do now to get myself caught up to where I need to be is going to be top priority. Having these books will be a pretty good help, but I know that I also need to branch out and talk to folks; which means I need to get out of my shell. Not sure there’s a book to really help me there; I just need to do it.