The Valuable Dev #33 - A Guide to Zsh Expansions with Examples
Monday Greetings, Valuable Developer
I wish you a Merry Christmas if you celebrate it! In any case, my best wishes to go through these difficult times.
I've spent most of this month working on my next Triple New York Time Best Seller™, my next book Learning to Play Vim. As always, the most difficult is not writing by itself, but to come up with the best ideas to make the book interesting and fun to read.
I think I'll be able to send the first-very-alpha version of the table of content at the beginning of next year, for everybody who signed up to the newsletter.
The article of this month is about Zsh expansions:
A Guide to Zsh Expansion with Examples
Expanding files, parameters, or the history with Zsh is the fastest way to get quickly what you want, without writing boring scripts. This article is packed with examples, and can serve as a good reference to cover your expanding needs.
Updates
- I've published the third part about Bash scripting best practices on my Youtube channel. It's a series of video where I write a Bash script, to back up data on a hard disk or on a remote server.
Articles & Videos
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Joe Amstrong's talks are always funny to watch and thought-provoking. Here's a good one: Systems that run forever self-heal and scale
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An interesting talk how to choose features for an application: Choosing features
Books
Some books to learn programming languages this week:
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Technical books are often dull and boringly written. In contrast, Clojure for the Brave and True is hilarious! It also explains many difficult concepts well. If you want to learn a LISP (you should!), don't hesitate. The online version is free, and, if you like it, I would encourage you to buy the printed version to support the author.
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If you already know a programming language and you'd like to learn Golang, Go in Action is a good choice. It helped me to learn Go quickly, even if I had to create my own side project on the side, to solve real problems with the language.
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The series of book Learn the Hard Way is quite good to pick up quickly new languages. That said, they're also quite boring at the beginning if you know already one or more programming languages.
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Nobody wants to learn Vimscript, but in case you'd like to, Learn Vimscript the Hard Way is by far the best resource to do so.
Mouseless
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I discovered Broot a couple of weeks ago. If you're searching for a good directory tree view with fuzzy search and many other options, it seems to be quite good in that regard.
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If you love some good old SQL, q let you manipulate plain text data with SQL requests directly in your shell.
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Here's htmlq, a tool similar to jq but to pipe and parse HTML instead of JSON.
Next Article
The second part of the series about measuring complexity will be out next month. Here's the first part.
Let's Connect
If you want more information about the content of this newsletter, or if you have any question, you can hit the wonderful "reply" button. I'm always happy to receive emails!
Similarly, if you think this newsletter is boring, if you didn't like my last article, or if you have any feedback of any sort, don't hesitate to reach out.
Thanks a lot for your interest in my work, and see you in a month!