[clug] Linux Resources

Brenton Ross rossb at fwi.net.au
Sun Jul 28 13:31:49 UTC 2019


While I agree with what Paul has written, especially about having a
project to provide some real world incentive, I would like to make a
couple of small points in defence of paper books:

They allow you to find things you were **not** looking for. Thumbing
through a book can frequently introduce you to some idea that while not
directly related to your immediate problem it does widen your knowledge
base. If all you ever read about is stuff directly concerned with your
immediate problem you are likely to miss out on a lot of other
concepts.

As for books being "out of date", well that depends on the type of book
you buy. Get ones that discuss the underlying theory rather than the
popular topic of the day.

Brenton


On Sun, 2019-07-28 at 19:44 +1000, Paul Wayper via linux wrote:
> On 28/7/19 10:17 am, Lindsay Steele via linux wrote:
> 
> Just a general question about learning resources.  What Linux
> learning
> resources do you find useful?
> 
> I think the best way is to set a challenge to achieve to the level
> that you
> feel suits you.
> 
> I agree.  I think just doing courses for the sake of doing courses
> isn't going
> to get you much practical experience for using it day to day.
> 
> In 2004 I got a home server and set up MythTV on it for recording TV
> programmes.  This then became our home file server, backup server,
> ssh
> gateway, web server, and more.  Each time you've got something
> working, push
> it a bit more.  Fix it when it breaks - and not by reinstalling, by
> rebuilding
> it back to working.  Don't turn SELinux or IPTables off - leave it on
> and use
> the current tools to get that new system working.
> 
> The other fundamental lesson is that asking someone else for help is
> always
> the absolute last resort :-)
> 
> In the time that you wait for a reply on the CLUG list, you could
> have done
> 47,192,895 Google queries and read 6,922,173 StackOverflow
> pages.  Amongst
> those, you will find the one piece of information that helps you get
> a bit
> further.  Read those man pages.  Try things and look for the
> errors.  Try
> alternate ways of approaching the problem.
> 
> It will be absolutely frustrating as hell!  It would be lovely for
> someone
> much more knowledgeable to come over and fix it for you.  But a) that
> wouldn't
> teach you much, b) it will take too long to happen if it does, and c)
> most of
> the time it won't happen anyway.  So learning by helping yourself,
> rather than
> asking other people for the answer to your problem, is almost always
> going to
> teach you more.
> 
> Other things I'd recommend:
> 
> * Learn to use Ansible, Puppet or some other automation tool (even a
> script)
> to install software and configure it.  There is *never* a once-off
> install -
> sooner or later you're going to have to restore your dead computer
> from
> back-ups, or set up another server like that, and that's where you
> want to
> have a script to run again.
> 
> * Learn to use Grafana, Prometheus, Performance Copilot, Zabbix or
> some other
> system monitoring software.  While it's nice to have your server at
> home
> ticking along, knowing how the disk space, or temperature, or hard
> disk error
> rates, have gone over time is important for future planning.  And
> it's much
> easier to look at some useful graphs than to ssh into twenty servers
> and do
> 'df -h' or `smartctl -A` on each one.
> 
> Finally, I'd say that although books are handy if you want something
> permanent, they're only marginally searchable.  A man page on a
> computer (or
> on linux.die.net) is much more searchable than the same page printed
> on paper
> and stuck in a book.  You can't copy and paste text from a book.  A
> book is
> almost immediately out of date.  And books take up physical
> space.  While I've
> got three bookshelves behind me almost completely full of books, I
> read mainly
> fiction and for pleasure.  Even my well-thumbed copies of Programming
> Perl and
> The C Programming Language are there mainly for historic reasons - I
> haven't
> used them in years, whereas the man pages still get plenty of use :-)
> 
> Have fun,
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
> 




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