Re: [PLUG] Places to learn Linux and C around Philadelphia?

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 7:04 AM Casey Bralla via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> I agree that you should get a old clunker and load/mess-up/re-load/mess-up/and re-load several times.  I also intensely dislike systemd systems, but you'll probably need to become familiar with it sometime.

The few hours it takes to grok systemd will probably get you far more
bang for the buck than the years it would take to really master C.  It
doesn't take long to master systemd and it is basically something you
have to understand to get paid to administer just about any linux
system today.  If it gets replaced at some point it will almost
certainly be by something that is even further from the previous
generation of service managers.

At this point I'd probably also be looking at something like Rust for
systems programming as it seems to be slowly replacing C, though I'm
sure that C will be around for decades much like COBOL still is.

I'd suggest that playing around in containers or VMs is going to be a
more efficient use of time than bare metal.  You can take a snapshot
and reset it every time you mess something up - far more efficiently
than pulling out a USB drive to reimage/restore/etc.  That said, being
able to use a rescue disk is also a valuable skill and I would make
sure that you're able to do it if you want to admin systems.

We're kinda conflating a few topics though.  You don't have to know
much C to admin a linux system, and you don't need to know much about
linux/systemd/etc beyond the system calls/etc to write C.  I'm not
sure which was your intended focus - you asked about C and we're kinda
assuming you want to be a sysadmin.  Of course, knowing the basics is
valuable regardless.  If your focus is on the software side then
really all you need to know is how to stick your code in a docker
container and run it, and if it blows up it won't hurt anything.

--
Rich
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