Anything about old PCs, their uses, related OSes and their users
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It is very hard to post with dillo or links browser as they don't store cookies, so my login is lost sometimes. Hence, a post I made didn't appear. The Palemoon browser that is sort of similar to firefox on the other hand needs more resources, so will use it only when needed on this old PC.
I never learned and studied the above, have heard about this long time ago. This seems to be vital even today.
The main reason I am sharing this is cause my personality so far has been the opposite of the above. To be leading in IT one must have excellent logic, constantly learn, be quick to adapt to change, move to what will be vital in future fast and dump what is not vital before it becomes trash. Can't wait till the last minute to squeeze the last penny out of the software, hardware. I am the super exact opposite of this, not sure if I can change this. Without learning data structures I was told one can never be a good coder.
With my mindset, regular IT work is not even possible to imagine remotely. So, anything I learn at this stage in life will be more for my self knowledge, hobby.
Also, as a Linux user I have been coasting along so far, not looking beneath the surface. I don't know how to move from one email client to next, don't know many configurations, in fact know hardly few. This is considering the fact that I have been using linux since 2002 end or so. This is a very hard thing to realize, no one else can do the learning for me. Wish someone had encouraged me to look beneath the surface of the gui atleast a little, even a few years ago.
What is the point of being an outstanding coder, if I can't do basic configurations on my own older PC ? So perhaps it is better to focus on the basic configurations, CLI more and mix with a little bit of coding learning.
Distribution: Mainly Devuan, antiX, & Void, with Tiny Core, Fatdog, & BSD thrown in.
Posts: 5,506
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You can learn the basics of coding by using the shell & creating scripts, then there is sed & awk to progress to.
They should be more than enough to obtain an understanding of how to (start) coding.
If you like doing it, then by that time, you'll have a good idea of which programming language to learn.
Everyone learns at different speeds, it's having the will to learn that counts.
You can learn the basics of coding by using the shell & creating scripts, then there is sed & awk to progress to.
They should be more than enough to obtain an understanding of how to (start) coding.
If you like doing it, then by that time, you'll have a good idea of which programming language to learn.
Everyone learns at different speeds, it's having the will to learn that counts.
Thanks for your kind words, much appreciated. I have been discouraged by others a lot in the past, even now we see data structures coming out to be important.
How will learning sed & awk help with learning C and other programming languages ? What about data structures ?
If I try to do one thing, I end up with 10 issues, have tons of bad luck, challenges. This is another major drawback at my end.
Looking under the hood of linux initially I got all excited, carried away and started jumping around too much. I need to have a plan and focus. Can try one or two things at the same time but not 10. So will try to get that balance.
Distribution: Mainly Devuan, antiX, & Void, with Tiny Core, Fatdog, & BSD thrown in.
Posts: 5,506
Rep:
Using something like bash to create scripts will give you a basic understanding of how to construct a program, sed & awk are more powerful for less typing.
You can create code blocks for reuse in most programming languages, that is the next step. Use something like Perl or Python, as they are written like scripts, but are executed JIT, (Just In Time), that means they are compiled as they run, so it makes correcting mistakes easier, like scripting.
After that are the fully compiled languages, C, C++, Fortran, etc.
No one can know everything about Linux, it is just too big, the trick is in knowing where to look for the answer to your problem - but some basic understanding goes a long way.
Awk is fun and easy to learn, but it won't teach you about any other language because awk is unique. It's completely data-driven. Each instruction is matched against the whole of the input stream but only executed on records/lines that match the accompanying specification.
Sed isn't a language. It's just a very powerful editor that uses regular expressions.
To learn bash, my advice is to study your system's init scripts.
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