Small, Sharp Software Tools: Harness the Combinatoric Power of Command-Line Tools and Utilities

by Brian P. Hogan

The command-line interface is making a comeback. That's because developers know that all the best features of your operating system are hidden behind a user interface designed to help average people use the computer. But you're not the average user, and the CLI is the most efficient way to get work done fast. Turn tedious chores into quick read and write files, manage complex directory hierarchies, perform network diagnostics, download files, work with APIs, and combine individual programs to create your own workflows. Put down that mouse, open the CLI, and take control of your software development environment. No matter what language or platform you're using, you can use the CLI to create projects, run servers, and manage files. You can even create new tools that fit right in with grep, sed, awk, and xargs. You'll work with the Bash shell and the most common command-line utilities available on macOS, Windows 10, and many flavors of Linux. Create files without opening a text editor. Manage complex directory strutures and move around your entire file system without touching the mouse. Diagnose network issues and interact with APIs. Chain several commands together to transform data, and create your own scripts to automate repetitive tasks. Make things even faster by customizing your environment, creating shortcuts, and integrating other tools into your environment. Hands-on activities and exercises will cement your newfound knowledge and give you the confidence to use the CLI to its fullest potential. And if you're worried you'll wreck your system, this book walks you through creating an Ubuntu virtual machine so you can practice worry-free. Dive into the CLI and join the thousands of other devs who use it every day. What You You'll need macOS, Windows 10, or a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, or Debian using the Bash shell.

Genres: Technology, Computers

328 pages, Paperback

Published June 13, 2019

Reviews

[Stefan Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Your experience with this book will totally depend on how far along you are in the subject matter.

If I had this when I was starting, it would have been an invaluable introduction to the command line and some related tools. It covers quite a lot of ground like shell usage, basic Linux stuff, and just a lot of "CLI" stuff that's definitely useful.

What it doesn't do, however, is go into any from of depth.

If you're an experienced "command line hacker", you'll struggle to find something new. It can be a nice refresher of some basics and a source for obscure occasionally useful tools (like script), but fundamentally, not much more.

It got me to look at a couple interesting tools I haven't paid attention to (ranger, pandoc, entr) that I occasionally find useful, which is nice.

Overall, I would highly recommend it if you have fairly basic CLI skills and not recommend it at all if you consider yourself an expert.

[Ravi Sinha · Rating 5 out of 5]

10/10 Would Recommend. Not just the usual UNIX-y goodness that we often tend to forget, the book also unearths hidden gems such as the ability to open an editor from the terminal to enter and edit a command, the ability to fix a command from the shell history in a designated editor, the ability to record a script of a shell session (plain text), a super clean way of colorizing terminal output for convenient reading, and the list goes on and on. The final chapter lists a bunch of neat additional tools that you can install on top of the defaults and shows compelling use cases for those. A Swiss Army Knife of little tools that every engineer should have in their toolset.

[William Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Small Sharp tools is an Intro to bash, that covers everything from cd and ls to basic networking. If you are early on as a developer (or are not as familiar or comfortable with the command line) this book will get you up to speed. Advanced users most likely will not have any Revelations but you may stumble across a command or tool you didn't know about along that way, which is sure to delight.