I read this book about 3 years ago. For some reason, I just decided to pick it up again. Last time, I read it I was an avid Linux hater. I didn’t really understand how to use Linux and always felt I was Googling random stuff to put into my terminal whenever I had a problem. Now, I use Linux about 70% of the time. I kind of just eventually gravitated towards it as a result of the wealth of opensource projects available on the platform. I’ve grown rather fond of the system.

Reading this book again, reminds me how much UNIX sucks. So many of the things they mentioned here are sad yet true.

1. The only reason Linux is secure is because it is so horribly designed. In order to attack a system, a hacker needs to be able to predict what the system will do next. Imagine a system that is a result of the combined efforts of thousands of programmers around the world, with different backgrounds and ideas. A system that is so incoherent, a system so illogical that it is invulnerable to attacks. That’s what Linux is…

2. All the different shells and methods were developed by individuals who did not stop to consider how their program would interact with the programs of other developers, resulting in so many ways to do the same thing with so many different functions.

3. The Linux commandline is like a powertool, except a powertool comes with instructions. Powertools are not fundamentally flawed in one form or another like sed, grep, and awk. You would never find anyone providing individuals such dangerous tools, with so little training in real life.

4. There are so many idiosyncracies about Linux. You devote all your time learning how to use weird libraries rather than programming applications that are actually useful.