Unix for the Beginning Mage
I stumbled upon the ebook Unix for the Beginning Mage (2005) by Joe Topjian this evening and I just had to mention it. It had me in stitches. Talk about running an analogy into the ground! Truly! It was actually kind of cute in a seriously “look I can balance a teapot on my head and play the full symphonic version of Beethoven’s 5th on a garden hose” kind of way!
Such a warm welcome awaits those who dare to read this mysterious text:
Hello, Young Mage! Welcome to the Tower of Nix! Here you’ll begin your training in the skills of Unix. I’ll be your Instructor and Narrator.
I felt positively warm and tingly! Of course after that friendly a greeting I simply had to read on:
Casting Your First Spell
To cast a spell, you simply type the name of the spell and press enter. Let’s try a simple spell called whoami.joe$ whoami (enter)
joe
joe$Casting the whoami spell whoami stands for Who Am I. As you can see in the figure, after you typed the word whoami and pressed enter, the spell returned the answer or output. The output of this spell is, oddly enough, your name (also referred to as a username or login name)1! The purpose of the whoami spell is to tell us the name of the user we are currently logged in as in Unix. It might sound silly right now, but it’s possible to cast spells that turn us into other people!
Wow! I didn’t know that that was actually magic. I had a sudden thought … I’d always wanted to know how to fly. Eagerly I skimmed ahead but it turned out that there were no instructions for that. Damned useless spell book if it doesn’t tell you how to fly. I was bitterly disappointed!
Peace out. Catch you on the flipside. ;oP
