Stuff I need/want to spend time learning

6 Comments

1. 

   Nelson

   June 23, 2012 at 10:46 pm

   Postgres is a pleasure. Particularly if you’re doing anything geographic; PostGIS is by far the leading open source option for geodata. Compared to MySQL, Postgres is like a database written by adults. Lots of nice things work right.

   Skip awk, it’s obsolete compared to Python/Perl/Ruby. tmux is on my list too.

   I’d love to know if you find a good source for learning more git. It’s so confusing. What I really want is a book like “the little lisper” that teaches git by example, little exercises and puzzles that teach you the git nature.
2. 

   Rafe (Post author)

   June 23, 2012 at 11:17 pm

   A book like “The Little Lisper” for Git would be great. As it turns out, I’m also reading The Little Schemer right now as well.

   As far as awk goes, I feel like I suffer the curse of anyone who learned Perl before they learned how to write real shell scripts, awk, sed, and all of those things. Once you know Perl, you don’t really need to learn any of those other things because you can just write a Perl script. I feel like that’s somehow not legit, though.
3. 

   Rafe (Post author)

   June 23, 2012 at 11:17 pm

   As far as Postgres goes, I’m amazed at how much more powerful its variant of SQL is than MySQL’s for many kinds of analytical tasks.
4. 

   Gregory

   June 25, 2012 at 4:43 pm

   For tmux, I recommend Brian P. Hogan’s “tmux: Productive Mouse-Free Development” book
5. 

   John

   June 25, 2012 at 6:26 pm

   Agree with Nelson on his Postgres and awk comments.

   git started making more sense to me when I tried to merge four different people’s changes from different forks of the same project. Pick a project on github and run with it.
6. 

   Kevin Spencer

   June 26, 2012 at 3:30 pm

   I’ve seen tmux mentioned a couple of times now and wondered if it was worth looking into if I’m already comforatble with ‘screen’.