Small, Sharp Software Tools

How to Use This Book

You can use Windows, Linux, or macOS to follow along with the activities and exercises in this book—as long as you run a Bash shell. Thankfully, that’s the default on macOS and most Linux variants, and you can set up Bash on Windows 10. However, you may want to use VirtualBox^[2] to install the Ubuntu operating system and use that instead.

Using VirtualBox, you can run the commands in this book without worrying about doing anything to harm your computer, and you can take snapshots of your virtualized environment which you can revert if something goes wrong while you’re working on the exercises in this book. You’ll also avoid inconsistencies between the various operating systems while you’re learning. Chapter 2, ​Creating ...