Review: Linux: The Command Line Beginner's Guide

Cover of Linux: Command Beginner's Guide by Jonathan Moeller

By Christopher Williams

A simple but important topic is knowing how to use the command line in Linux and going online to find that little command pretty annoying so is Linux: The Command Beginner’s Guide by Jonathan Moeller a good book to keep ready on the shelf?

This book goes through just about all of the basics that you would ever need. It talks about how to create and destroy user accounts, group membership, editing text files, process management and a bit more. It is done to the basic level so it can’t overwhelm you with details and it is quite easy to follow along. It also goes over the concept as well before going into the commands so you know why you would even use that command in the first place like knowing what a daemon and why you probably shouldn’t mess with.

An example of using the df command and what the output is

The structure is pretty good where it first goes over the concept in a short chapter then goes over the commands that are involved in the chapter. It will sometimes bring up comparisons with Windows because chances are you used windows before Linux. Mac is only mentioned at the beginning because it is so similar to Linux since it uses the same shell called bash anyways. I also liked the short examples that are used with each command and then going over what that output means. The examples also tended to extend from the previous so the user that was created in the user creation example would then be used in the group membership example so it was very easy to follow along. You might have noticed that the book is about ten years old but all of the the commands still work the same and are almost certainly not going to change in the future so don't worry about how old the book is.

Silent Order: Wreck Hand, an example of the other work Jonathan Moeller has written

The book is a pretty dry read though and this is coming from someone that enjoys reading math proof books (Proofs: A Long Form Mathematics Textbook by Jay Cummings is a pretty good example of a book that makes an incredibly dry topic interesting ). It is always hard to make a technical book an entertaining read but even just making it more story-like for the examples could have helped. The author is even a fantasy and sci fi writer so adding a bit more character to the example could have made it more inviting to read. A more informal writing style could have helped as well because it reads like a page from the Linux manual at times. One thing I would have liked to see would be a short command glossary at the end of the book or even better at the end of the command chapter so if you need to quickly find the command you can do so just like it was done in Ry's Git Tutorial.

I would recommend this book purely because it is short ,pretty cheap and it does a good job of teaching the basics. If you need to use the basics of Linux for work or for school then just grab the kindle book, go to the chapter, read it and then put it away for next time. It is a quick functional book that does its job and saves you the hassle of searching through the internet to find the info you need. Anything more than that is asking for too much.

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