[lug] Learnin Linux on yer own..... my own little RFC!!!

[David Morris]

All the other notes about working with LINUX/UNIX are great, and are without 
question some items to tackle, but I would put one skill ahead of all of 
the others:

	The willingness to play around.

No matter if what you are doing is System Administration, Programming, 
Support, or what, this is by far the most important skill.  Yes, at first 
you will probably start out mucking things up royally (at least I did and 
so have several people I know!), but you learn from this.  If you manage 
to get your test system so bad you have to wipe the hard-disk and start 
from scratch, great...you get another chance to get more information out 
of the install process.

In the last several years, I have worked with a lot of computer people 
ranging over just about every side of computing you can immagine.  The one 
trait that all of them who were good at thier job had in common was the 
willingness to play around.  Eventally, and sooner than you might think, 
we all reach a point where the results of the playing around produce bad 
effects only rarely...and most of those can be corrected quickly before it 
becomes a problem.  I am willing to bet that any good programming/sys. admin/
whatever could say, though they might not outwardly admit it, that they 
frequently do things that they do not know ahead of time will work.

And furthermore, I would have a low opinion of anyone working in computers 
who claims they always know the solution to every problem in advance.  This 
is a fine answer for the end-user in most situations, but computers are 
changing so fast at the moment and the field is growing so rappidly that 
almost nobody can know everything.

Well, enough rambling...just my 2 cents worth for you to think about.

--David


On Sat, 8 Apr 2000, John Starkey wrote:

> An idea for the group. 
> 
> How about some of you who are working in the fields, any as long as it's
> linux or unix based computing, recommending the skills that you think us
> wannabe's should work on obtaining in order to enter at say $35 - 40k/yr., 
> which I've heard is definately possible.
> 
> Like as I've stated I wanna work on getting into the field in the next
> year and I gotta teach myself for the most part. So what would you
> guy/gals recommend I learn. If I had to work next to you on a project what
> skills (in terms of languages and getting around the system) would you
> want to see.
> 
> I've heard Python, Perl, and C++......
> 
> Anyone?????
> 
> John
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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