2018-04-05
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   "In this bleak age when search engine algorithms dredge up
    shoddily-assembled HOWTOs and pass them off as authorative
    documents, providing for the next generation of sysadmins
    is one of the most vital tasks that we face as profession."
                             -- Michael W Lucas, 'Ed Mastery'


Michael Lucas has always had a lucky hand (or he's listened close
enough to people) for books that are really needed. I fondly remember
reading the 1st edition of 'Absolute OpenBSD' which was one of the
first books giving a detailed description of how to run OpenBSD
properly.

So on April 1st Michael has released the latest of his dozen or so
books on IT 'niche' topics: Ed(1). Carefully picking the release date
almost caught me off guard and I disregarded it as yet another (bad)
april fools joke. But luckily tomasino showed me it was real.

I got the paper edition or the book for normal people. As I have been
following Michael on mastodon I think the backstory to it is this: He
has been receiving negative feedback on deliberately choosing female
pronouns in his examples for one of his last books.  (It may have
been even pronouns with randomly chosen gender, I do not remember
correctly).

So this book has been offered in a snarky move as the edition for
'normal' people featuring female pronouns, because there are a lot of
nice and brilliant female IT professionals.

And in response to the critics there is a 'Manly MacManface' edition
that uses male pronouns only and is slightly more expensive.  A not
so small percentage of the retail price is donated to a Soroptimist
International chapter.

So all shenanigans aside, let's get to the book: The tone is set
slightly preacherous and exaggerating as shown on the introductory
quote above. However who could be too serious when talking about
ed(1). While ed(1) is really simple and *really* available on every
unix system out there, it sure is nothing one would write a book in
right? Right?!

While I do not know Michael has written this book, I use ed(1) now to
get this post into my file system (and off my chest). Ed *is* usable
and indeed a powerful text editing engine. The editor sam owes a lot
of its ideas and customs to ed.

Also don't let yourself be fooled by the informal tone of the book!
Michael did his research and knows his stuff. It is a comprehensive
book about the unix standard editor including advanced topics such as
ed's regexp commands and how to script ed.

I would recommend Michael's 13th IT mastery book to anyone interested
in the concepts that drive a lot of unix machinery we now take for
granted: grep (the name comes from ed's command combo g/re/p), sed,
diff (has a flag to output an ed script for changing file a into file
b) and many others including my beloved sam.

The book's price is probably cheaper than your lunch at work, fun to
read and I wholehartedly recommend it.


Go and get Ed Mastery!

P.S.: I usually never give out recommendations to buy stuff online,
I am in no way affiliated with Michael W Lucas nor do I get any
compensation for this post (apart from scolding that I get it all
wrong).



___References________________________________________________________

[0]: https://www.michaelwlucas.com/tools/ed

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