Comment by asicsp

4 years ago

I use my ebooks for reference:

* GNU grep and ripgrep (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnugrep_ripgrep/)

* GNU sed (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnused/)

* GNU awk (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnuawk/)

* Ruby one-liners cookbook (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_ruby_oneliners/)

* Perl one-liners cookbook (https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_perl_oneliners/)

* Command line text processing with GNU Coreutils (https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli_text_processing_coreuti...)

* Command line text processing with Rust tools (https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli_text_processing_rust/) — work-in-progress

* Computing from the Command Line (https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli-computing/) — work-in-progress

I consider myself pretty experienced at shell-fu and capable of doing most things I set out to achieve in either bash scripts or fearless one-liners. However, my awk is rudimentary at best, I think mostly because it's such an unforgiving environment to experiment in.

These books you've written are great for a bit of first principles insight and then quickly building up to functional usage. I will have no hesitation in referring colleagues to them!

Do you have a patreon or something similar? Do you accept pull requests for collaboration?

Thanks for creating such great free material!

  • Thanks a lot for the feedback :)

    Curious about what kind of issues you had with `awk`. Perhaps https://awk.js.org/ could help?

    >Do you have a patreon or something similar?

    I pay my bills by selling PDF/EPUB versions of these books. Purchase links are mentioned in the 'Buy' page. You can also visit https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/ or https://leanpub.com/u/learnbyexample

    >Do you accept pull requests for collaboration?

    Not currently. You can file issues on GitHub (links are mentioned in the preface chapter) for typos/bugs/suggestions/etc.

    Markdown source for these books are also available on GitHub.

    • That AWK REPL in JS is amazing! Just what I need for a playground to refine my understanding of its language. Thank you!

      I will consider buying the books and spread the word :) Thanks again!

  • I suggest:

    C-x C-e in the CLI (not sure if it’s zsh only) will open your command line in your $EDITOR - useful to get code highlighting and write multi line commands if that’s the blocker. The problem is iterating.

    OR

    Pipe your awk input to a file and then use this thing I wrote to build up your awk program. I use it most often with `jq`.

    https://github.com/bigH/interactively

I stumbled upon your vi post a few days ago, really like the style. Keep it up!

  • Thanks a lot for the feedback, feels great to know the content style suited well for you :)

I see you sell your books as ebooks (awesome BTW), but there's no print option. I've been looking into publishing methods for a book I've been writing, and having a print copy is very appealing (I'm a big physical book fan, personally). I see a lot of modern software books are digital only. Is this due to the margins on print being much lower than digital? Print on demand is a really neat concept to me, but seems to come at a cost.

Just curious to hear from someone who's been around the block with this.

  • I haven't really looked into print on demand. I started with ebooks since that seemed the easiest option for me. And it is easy for readers to get updated versions.

    My books are around 100 pages and I've seen a few readers mentioning that they just print it themselves.

Great work! Seriously cool e-books!

(edit: reading this i sound like a jerk. wasn’t trying to be one.) However, these are books not cheat sheets. Cheat sheets are about glance ability and one page ness.

  • That's a fair point, something like `tldr` and `cheat.sh` mentioned elsewhere in this thread.