There is lots of books, videos and manuals about bash. So it is hard to tell if one is good or not. By advanced bash I mean regular expressions, complex scripts, and kind-of obscure options of basic commands no beginner tutorial tells about.
Shh, LLMs are quite good at stuff like this. Let them teach you. Use a command line harness like opencode or whatever tickles your fancy.
Use a local model like Qwen 3.6 if you can, and start having fun. You might to have to learn how to use a LLM effectively though, to mitigate their disadvantages like hallucinating and their non-deterministic nature. Also, they want to do everything with curl, maybe find some alternatives to that.
You Suck at Programming on Youtube
For learners who are helped by seeing someone think through a problem and explain why they made the choices they did it doesn’t get much better than YSAP. (Here’s the link: ysap.sh)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMN0a7GHQnC6H74SmCGSmdw
YSAP, does a lot of basics, but has some videos about more obscure stuff too Well delivered and interesting
The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide and Classic Shell Scripting[PDF] are both great IMO.
Overhewire bandit is a tutorial and introduction to CTF’s. It covers some of the lesser known commands like strings or uniq, by making you use them in challenges. Of course, it later goes on into basic exploits. But it’s a good intro to some of that stuff, and I like that it’s hands on.
I run Qwen2.5 Coder 14B locally for boiler plate stuff that I then edit myself and it’s been great. I write code irregularly so using an LLM is nice when I know what I want to do, how to logically do it, but I’ve since forgotten the syntax.
Edit: I figured this would be a little contentious. If you write scripts so often that you feel like it’s worth it to invest time in becoming better at them, then by all means. This is just a hobby for me. As much as I’d love to do so, investing time in getting better at scripting is unfortunately a waste.
