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A review by books_are_nice_and_enjoyable
The Linux Command Line by William E. Shotts Jr.
This one was really hard to rate, so I decided not to. It included quite a few things which are actually useful for me to know, in the context of my work. I have used things I learned from this book in my work. It also included some stuff I already knew. But/and it unfortunately also includes some really ugly solution proposals, of the kind which I would happily burn to the ground if I ever found them in code segments I were meant to maintain.
One of the problems at work here is that this is a book about how to use specific tools to solve specific problems. But what if it's madness to try to solve some of those problems with those tools? Sure, you could solve the problem like that, but should you do that? Sometimes the answer is no, you shouldn't, and that dimension does not get much/enough coverage here. Some of the later segments in particular reminded me of conceptually similar passages from de Graaf & Molinaro's book The SQL Cookbook. In that book, the authors also happily cover various ways to solve specific problems which any semi-competent software developer would never in a million years consider using SQL to solve, because using SQL to solve that problem would just be stupid and crazy and lead to a solution structure which would be impossible to maintain. This kind of thing subtracts from the overall experience, which was however mostly positive.
One of the problems at work here is that this is a book about how to use specific tools to solve specific problems. But what if it's madness to try to solve some of those problems with those tools? Sure, you could solve the problem like that, but should you do that? Sometimes the answer is no, you shouldn't, and that dimension does not get much/enough coverage here. Some of the later segments in particular reminded me of conceptually similar passages from de Graaf & Molinaro's book The SQL Cookbook. In that book, the authors also happily cover various ways to solve specific problems which any semi-competent software developer would never in a million years consider using SQL to solve, because using SQL to solve that problem would just be stupid and crazy and lead to a solution structure which would be impossible to maintain. This kind of thing subtracts from the overall experience, which was however mostly positive.