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The suggested way of learning Unix is to read a little, then to play
a little. Keep playing until you're comfortable with the concepts,
and then start skipping around in the book. You'll find a variety of
topics are covered, some of which you might find interesting. After a
while, you should feel confident enough to start using commands
without knowing what they should do. This is a good thing.
What most people regard as Unix is the Unix
shell shell, a special program that interprets
commands. In practice, this is a fine way of looking at things, but
you should be aware that Unix really consists of many more things,
or much less. (Depending on how you look at it.) This book tells you
about how to use the shell , programs that Unix usually
comes with, and some programs Unix doesn't always come with.
The current chapter is a meta-chapter--it discusses this book and how
to apply this book to getting work done. The other chapters contain:
- Chapter 2
- discusses where Unix and Linux came
from, and where they might be going. It also talks about the Free
Software Foundation and the GNU
Project .
- Chapter 3
- talks about how to start and stop using
your computer, and what happens at these times. Much of it deals
with topics not needed for using Linux, but still quite useful and
interesting.
- Chapter 4
- introduces the Unix shell. This
is where people actually do work, and run programs. It talks about
the basic programs and commands you must know to use Unix.
- Chapter 5
- covers the X Window System. X is the
primary graphical front-end to Unix, and some distributions set it
up by default.
- Chapter 6
- covers some of the more advanced
parts of the Unix shell. Learning techniques described in this
chapter will help make you more efficent.
- Chapter 8
- describes the Emacs text
editor. Emacs is a very large program that integrates many of
Unix's tools into one interface.
- Chapter 7
- has short descriptions of many
different Unix commands. The more tools a user knows how to use,
the quicker he will get his work done.
- Chapter 11
- describes some of the larger,
harder to use commands.
- Chapter 12
- talks about easy ways to avoid
errors in Unix and Linux.
Next: Documentation
Up: Introduction
Previous: How to Avoid Reading
Converted on:
Mon Apr 1 08:59:56 EST 1996