“If you’re just starting to learn Linux in the hopes of becoming
a paid professional, or have been using it for some time for
personal use and are interested in making a career out of it, the
main question on your mind, is probably “what do I really need to
know to make a living doing this?”. This subject could easily be
expanded to a full length book of suggested learning, but I will
outline some of the basic concepts and skills you should be seeking
to acquire for yourself in the interest of becoming a paid Linux
professional.”
“Virtually all Linux/UNIX programs of any reasonable complexity
(ie: most daemons) rely on configuration files of some form or
another to shape their operational parameters. Since this is a fact
of life, you should be well versed in at least one of the many text
editors included with most Linux distributions. The vi editor is
far and away the most common, although any editor with which you
feel comfortable will do just fine. For myself, I use the much less
common fte for coding and other complex editing tasks, or pico for
simple things such as composing this article or simple
configuration file editing.”
“While not required by many entry level jobs, I highly
recommend you learn at least a little basic shell scripting or perl
coding. I use shell scripts to automate tasks and ease my
workload in a wide variety of ways every day: Cron jobs to search
through my log files looking for anomalies to E-Mail to me, scripts
to check system status and page me if anything unusual is
happening, scripts to perform complicated tasks such as creating
virtual mail/web/dns/chat/etc. domains for ISP clients, scripts to
automate much of the process of upgrading of software packages,
etc. The uses for shell or perl scripts are limitless,
and the languages are far easier to learn than most of the more
sophisticated programming languages.”