Classic Shell Scripting Arnold Robbins, Nelson H.F. Beebe

Recommend it to anyone with a basic understanding and a will to learn more. It also really doubles as a rich information resource. Cannot recommend it enough if books are your thing.

It's helpful to learn some more about bash, and there's some good stuff in there. But shell scripts above a few dozen lines tops are a bad idea, and even those "few dozen" lines need a surprising amount of armoring with "set -e" and such.

I don't think this is because bash is bad. I've come to the conclusion that there's a fundamental tension between interactive use and safe programmatic use, and anything really good at the one is not going to be good at the other. In particular, interactive users more-or-less want the shell to accept inputs that are a bit sloppy, because they can interactively recover from the vast bulk of misinterpretations immediately, whereas a program becomes very risky with the same level of sloppiness because it will quite likely just keep going, doing very bad crazy stuff. (Which is why all my shell scripts tend to start with "set -e", which amounts to "If you get confused... STOP, instead of trashing an arbitrary amount of state.")

And again let me emphasize #1. By splitting my world up into interactive use and programmatic use, I've made my peace with shell, and I don't hate it or anything. I use a lot of the features interactively. For instance, I do a lot of little loops on the command line. Often I'll build them up with some "echo"s done to make sure that it's about to do what I think it will do. There's a lot of great ways to save time in interactive bash (or zsh or whatever), and the best part is, in interactive use you can be as crazy efficient as you want and there are no software engineering implications. Writing bash scripts with every crazy sophisticated trick in the books starts raising software engineering issues fast, and worst of all, some of them are quite invisible ("what if you run this in a directory with a file with a space in it? a newline? a file called '-rf'?"), to say nothing of whether the next person working on the script will know what all the fancy operations do. And I've got a decent-sized collection of 5-line bash scripts lying around doing various things. I just don't let them get much longer.

One of the most useful things to do is just load up an index in your head of what bash can do, then know you can look it up if you ever want it.

(Substitute your choice of shell for bash throughout.)

  ${VAR:INDEX}
  ${VAR/PATTERN}
  ${VAR#PATTERN}

I don't have a formal place for reviews but I posted about it on HN previously and the response seemed positive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10112615.

Also, you can enter "hackernews" to get 25% off

And goes on from there ;)

Then when I was 22, after a good computer science education, my first job was working at EA, and the build system involved a bunch of batch files. That knowledge from nearly a decade before came in handy! The CS stuff didn't come up until later.

I myself have found out that during meetings I prefer to use a pen and paper but it is mostly just notes that I take for myself.

The summaries always go out as emails, of course, and if I paper note-take, I try to take a picture and upload it to onenote or sharepoint.

The trello part is more recent, but I have notebooks going back to my first internship in 2012(which I know isn't that long for most here). It's pretty interesting to see old notes I took and the problems I had at the time.

As a result I exclusively use pen-and-paper for meetings. I also started using fountain pens about two years ago and the discipline required to write well, especially with vintage flexible nib pens, helps keep me focused on note-taking.

Later on, wasting time reading NNTP news at the uni was also actually a good investment for learning the language in a way that is useful at work.

For my kids, the games have again been the same thing, along with Harry Potter books.

Wow, that is pretty weird. That was true for me in college. I was at home after graduating in January 2002, at the bottom of the dot com bust. It was hard to find a job then.

I took this world music course in college, and I remember I talked to this guy who was also a computer science major, and he told me he was going to EA. Probably 6 months later, I e-mailed him out of the blue, and that got me the internship which led to my first job.

So instead of all the computer science stuff, I should have just relied on connections from the world music course and on my DOS batch file knowledge from age 13 :)

QBasic was nice, but no-where near as all-encompassing as touch-typing.

It should be an absolute clusterfuck but it's been surprisingly reliable and performant, to the point where I have no desire to replace it.