User Profile

Another section that could've been useful is how background scheduled tasks work nowadays. The book says it's the cron daemon and that anyone can list or edit those tasks with crontab. The truth is, now that's the barest of hooks to run another tool called Anacron and it has no tool to list or manage its tasks. The text files all point to more text files and it's your typical mess of indirections and state you have to keep in your head, as you would be required to guess when the "weekly" tasks would run next, what has run recently, or even what any of these tasks are for, because distribution maintainers don't comment their anacrontab entries. Anacron is by no means too new to mention in this book: it is a quarter century old already.

Ok one topic that definitely isn't just for programmers is Linux Capabilities (Capability-based privilege). They do mention setuid, I think they should have a whole chapter on this, and the tools of the libcap project like getcap, setcap.

Disappointingly this book doesn't cover signals: SIGINT, SIGTERM, SIGUSR1, SIGABORT. It shows how to "trap" (set up a signal handler) from a shell script, but not in a program, where it is significantly more complex and unintuitive (signal masks, per-thread signals versus per-process ones, etc.). There's the use of "kill" to send a signal, which is a poor name: what about signals that don't kill? What's the difference between a STOP signal and a TSTP? The latter is Terminal SToP, it's what you send when you hit CTRL-Z and immediately have no idea how to get your long-running task back.

In fact, nothing about IPC at all in this book, I guess it's considered a programmer topic.

This was recommended to me

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard ah, now I know the name for the way the filesystem is organized. This always seemed like a user-hostile mess. The /usr subdirectory has no user files, /dev and /proc and /sys aren't even real files, /media is just a mount point even though we already have /dev for devices and there's a /mnt which seems completely redundant. User-space software exists in /bin but also /sbin but also /usr/bin and /usr/sbin (is it for the user or the system? which is it guys?) and finally also /opt.

I am going to blow through this and see what new stuff I can pick up

I don't think I will remember any of the stories in a year, they are all sort of mediocre fiction that a high school student might have written for a class assignment in creative writing. But 'graded readers' are edutainment — they are structured in a way that they can reinforce what you know and help you understand phrases and grammatical patterns through repeated exposure. The stories don't need to be good, they just need to be good enough to keep you reading. And they are, here. I'm going to go get the Intermediate level in this series!

I chose conservatively when I picked the "Advanced Beginner" level. I think I undershot, because I didn't have any trouble with understanding the readings. I also had no problem answering any of the comprehension questions, which are all easy multiple choice answers, and you would need to be entirely lost in order not to get them all correct. I'm used to textbooks and language proficiency tests, which ask cruelly nuanced questions that require total comprehension. This is more like reading for enjoyment, and I would like to try the Intermediate Level just to see if it works better for me.

It's supposed to be for "Advanced beginners" so I thought I would start here. It's not bad, I'm still learning some words and phrases. Disclaimer: I learned Spanish decently in the late 1990's but let it fade out of my brain somewhat, so this is to try to get it back.