Which printed books or manuals, that are under free license, do you use to learn about personal computing?
Hi, I am looking for titles of printed books or manuals under free license; books to learn about personal computing, GNU/Linux and other software I use in general.
I use this forum a lot to learn, and the Man pages or help pages or programmes, but sometimes I like to have a printed book to get a primer on a topic, or as an alternative to searching the web when I am seeking to get something done on the spot e.g. looking for a command.
Do you use or know of books or manuals under free license?
Some of the topics or programmes I am interested in: GNU/Linux, vim, LaTex, pandoc, sed, awk, grep , mutt.
A couple of books under free license, available in prints, I use:
- ProGit which is under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license;
- Introduction to the Command Line which is under GNU Free Documentation License.
I also found it is possible to order a printed copy of the Wikibook on LateX but I have not tried ordering it yet.
There is also a book titled The Linux Command Line by William Shotts; the PDF and HTML versions are under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0, but the printed copy is non-free.
I forgot to add Free software, free society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman which is one of the first books I read to understand more on how to approach personal computing freely (or his biography by Sam Williams and RMS himself, maybe).
On LaTeX, I read some of https://archives.framabook.org/tout-sur-latex/ but it is in French. There are good things in that wikibook too: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
I made some slides and exercises on grep, sed and awk in https://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/en/mda.html#slides :
- grep: https://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/slides/mda4.pdf
- sed: https://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/slides/mda5.pdf
- awk: https://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/slides/mda6.pdf
Before that, consider studying "simple but powerful text-processing commands": https://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/slides/mda3.pdf
I tend to believe those slides are OK to get a (basic, especially for sed: I essentially only teach the substitution command) understanding of text-processing through commands, given that you truly take time to solve the exercises (the data for them and answers are still online): to learn those commands, practice is essential.
For more advanced content on AWK (function, getline, system calls, gawk's extensions, which are really useful, etc.), the manual of GNU AWK is great: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/
https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/ looks more like a reference book (on POSIX regular expressions; learning grep grep is essentially that, and they are essential for sed and awk too).
Although I do a lot of text processing, I have never felt the need to learn more advanced content on sed than what I teach. It is, in my humble opinion, a chore to use sed for more than substitutions. Every time I read a sed solution to a greater problem, it looked horribly complicated and could be easily achieved in AWK. Anyway, GNU sed has a manual too: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/
Thank you for the information and guidance on how to approach your materials and learning about sed, grep and awk. I went through a couple of slide decks. It looks like the content and exercises is what I need. I will keep the GNU manuals in mind but I think I have enough with your slide decks for now. Thanks again.
Also, thank you for reminded me about Famabook. I will start with the pdf of "tout sur latex"; there is no printed copies of the book available at the moment.
I get a lot of my information about how to build different packages and how GNU/Linux distros are structured by going through the Linux From Scratch documentation. I consider that to be kind of an online book, that is constantly being updated.
Thank you for pointing the Linux From Scratch documentation to me. It often happens that I would like to find more information about packages when installing programmes, or about "what does what" and how things work together. I also like the idea of building a GNU/Linux system from scratch, and having a system with just what I need. Thanks again. I saved the web page of LFS along with the slide decks of Magic Banana on "simple but powerful text-processing commands", grep, sed and awk.
LFS is quite a powerful book/tool. If you ever need to compile a package on Trisquel or another libre distro, and you don't know which dependencies you need or which commands to give to download the source and compile it, LFS usually will give you step-by-step instructions, either in the main LFS book or the "Beyond LFS" (BLFS) book. Recently I wanted to build the latest Libreoffice on Hyperbola, since Hyperbola's repo version is almost 1 1/2 years out of date. I used the BLFS commands for the main steps to find and build the source, and had to use my own intuition for figuring out a few of Hyperbola's oddball dependencies and config options. But without the BLFS step-by-step, I would have been a little lost. Libreoffice has their own build instructions, but they appear to be out of date and are more geared toward building a development version rather than a stable version.
Also the fact that you can download LFS and BLFS as off-line books to your computer makes it a good resource for general stuff like figuring out how grub and chroot works and so forth.
Thanks a lot for providing me with an example of how to use LFS (and BLFS); that's actually what I had in mind on how to use the book; seeking help when I am struggling to build. I downloaded an HTML version of LFS for now.