[clug] The CLUG 'Bookshelf'

[steve jenkin]

What books do you have on your bookshelf that you’d recommend to someone working with ‘Linux’ / GNU / Open Source?

Or to rephrase into 2019, what books, sites / URL’s & pages would consist your best set of resources?

There’s room on the <http://clug.org.au> page to put such a collection, alongside the ‘projects’ page.

To be of most use, such a list needs to be ‘canonical’:
  - “best of breed”,
  - short (“less is more”) and
  - little / no overlapping content.

Which suggests an collective process to both add and remove items & a voting mechanism to support it.
I’d suggest automation over an individual manually ‘curating’ a list with all the problems it brings.

I’d prefer some version of voting items up & down - seen in many forums, but with the whirlpool idea of different classes of contributor having different ‘weight’. The opinions of tool authors & maintainers (e.g. ‘automake’) should carry more weight than others, especially random passers-by.

CLUG has existed as a list & website for quite some time because of its small ‘footprint’ and light time impost for those doing the work. A ‘bookshelf’ has to conform with this “super lightweight” approach.

I’d also suggest leveraging the existing mail-list in some way - there’s only room for one list of CLUG ‘members’, even if a Wiki or Forum is used, it must somehow reuse the mail-list ‘member list’.

In searching the web for solutions to ‘dd’ and EOF handling, I was surprised at how hard it was to find a solution and that I couldn’t be the first to face this problem (given I’d first encountered this question prior to 1988).

But I was more surprised to find a great on-line reference I’d not seen before,
which included examples and bash functionality new to me.
This was a great discovery for me, but I’d like to make it easier for others in the future when their skill, interest and need collide in the same way.

There are many other shells out there (csh, zsh for instance) for which definitive guides may also exist - which would be a great addition to any collection. My usage of ‘bash’ is historical accident, not based on a comparison.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
	An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting
	Mendel Cooper
<http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/abs-guide.html>

If you’ve never seen them, there are a couple of "Rosetta Stone” sites out there that I’ve used / looked at from time to time.
I’d guess in the same way that CTAN spawned CPAN and others, there must be other ’translator’ site some of you know & use… 


Bruce Hamilton’s (original) Rosetta Stone for Unix-like systems
	A Sysadmin's Unixersal Translator
<http://bhami.com/rosetta.html>


Rosetta Code by Michael Mol
<http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code>


so, what next?

steve

--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin