loveknight

joined 2 weeks ago
 

ISBN: 9780596005955

This book is extremely readable and gives a very good introduction to the various standard Unix shell commands (grep, sed, awk, tr, sort to name but a few) and how to tie them together to do useful things. It's very suitable if you have some experience with the command line at the level of individual commands but now want to see how to do construct more interesting pipelines and scripts. It includes an introduction to regular expressions. The fact that the book is already 20 years certainly means that some explanations and approaches are outdated, but since shell programming is at the core about text processing, almost all contents of the book are still relevant today.

 

Things I would like every young web engineer to learn:

  • anything you can do in CSS + HTML, you should do in CSS + HTML
  • framework du jour is not a platform, it's a high-interest loan against your future capacity. The platform is the platform
  • understanding the memory hierarchy always matters
  • client-side isn't easier than the server, and "generalists" usually suck at client-side. Mind the (packet) gap
  • managers who are not technical are not useful
  • put users first, always

Second-order things to learn:

  • the way browsers work isn't static, but it also isn't changing that fast. Learn as much as you can and update every few years; particularly about networking and the rendering loop.
  • JS is the slowest way to do anything on the web. Never let it become the way you do everything.
  • a11y isn't nice-to-have, it's the job
  • shipping fast almost never matters as much as quality, & there are simple heuristics you can use to understand the difference
[–] loveknight@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago

New to this instance, but for me too it is comparatively sluggish since I started using it yesterday.