[BMW_TT]

I have an interview for a junior developer position and it requires Unix. They think I might be a good candidate with a strong SQL background. Now for the question, how hard is it to pick up Unix?

[Robertbog]

Strong SQL background eh? Do any site designing? I need a web designer.

[1WickedE90]

Originally Posted by BMW_TT

I have an interview for a junior developer position and it requires Unix. They think I might be a good candidate with a strong SQL background. Now for the question, how hard is it to pick up Unix?

Good luck on landing the job When I was learning Unix (Sun & IBM AIX variants), I bought a couple of books, took about 5-7 classes in each, and know enough to understand when I don't know what I'm doing

Seriously, it won't be too difficult to pick up for you since you have a SQL background - I found learning AD more difficult since it's a bastardized version of NDS and a lot of things don't make sense.

[its ray den]

what does knowing SQL have anything to do with Unix? NOTHING.

it's hard to pick up UNIX if you don't use it, but like any command line interface, you can learn some of the basic commands and be able to make your way around.

i'd suggest you install linux and start messing around with it. you don't need a book since all your resources can be found online, but i think for a jr dev position, you can get away with just knowing basic, cp, rm, md, cd, ls, grep, find, ps, mount and umount. know how to redirect IO, setup your network, and how to start and stop services.

maybe learning some of the more important conf files would help as well.

[1WickedE90]

Originally Posted by its ray den

what does knowing SQL have anything to do with Unix? NOTHING.

Correct. What I meant was, he already has a background in a programming language, so he wouldn't find it too difficult to learn an OS like Unix. Just trying to encourage the chap

[BMW_TT]

I've been looking online at Unix tutorials. The basic command lines I can get easily.

[TofuTurkey]

Originally Posted by BMW_TT

I have an interview for a junior developer position and it requires Unix. They think I might be a good candidate with a strong SQL background. Now for the question, how hard is it to pick up Unix?

I think it depends on the kind of development. Basic commands can be picked up easily, but application development requires knowing the norms, some might say "culture", such as, header files are usually placed in /usr/include, and configurations in /etc, and so on. Different flavors of *nix have slightly different ways of doing things.

The amount of experience required increases if we need to interact more with the system, for instance if we deal with firewalls then we have to understand iptables (for Linux), how routing takes place, firewall rules and polices, etc. At this level, I find it easier to read the documentation that comes with the packages, or google them, rather than read a book which is likely to be outdated by the time it's published.

If I were you I would try and get some idea of the kind of development required. For instance if it's some website Ruby thing, then I'll run through the Ruby installation process, try writing some code, and get it to run. Trying it yourself has got to be the most important step

[geoff2010]

I run a software company which currently has about 45 servers in 3 datacenters. The majority of these servers were windows up until about 1 year ago when I decided i was just sick and tired of Mircrosoft.

We have made a 90% switch to Linux Red Hat and CentOS (free version of RHEL). It took me about 5 installs in VMWare before I was comfortable with everything from networking, configuration, building stuff from source, etc.

We are running pretty advanced configurations which include Bonded NIC devices and High Availability with DRBD and the LinuxHA (heartbeat) project.

anyway the moral of the story is that if you are a smart guy and understand computers... you will have no problem whatsoever.

-G

[RiXst3r]

IMHO... The harder part of running unix is dealing with the major differences in how each distribution handles packages, networking, config file locations, startup scripts, etc... but all of that is easily googled.

When it comes down to learning the basics, just get a book, and run some non-gui flavors of unix at home to play around with, and configure.

[BMW_TT]

Thanks for all the advice. Hopefully I can make an impression with the interviewers.