Exercise 30. Lather, Rinse, Repeat: The Grand Rote Learning

Amount of information in this guide is pretty big. You cannot retain it without long enough practice and some hardcore grinding. So the only task left for you will be filling in this table, and imprinting this table in your memory every day until you know it.

You may want to ask why do you need to memorize all this stuff if you can always look it up. Well, the short answer will be because you can not. What this means is that to look up things efficiently you already need what to look for, and to know what to look for, you need a solid foundation. Once you have this foundation, once you understand what is important and what is not, and how the system is organized, you will be able to efficiently look things up.

You may wonder why in my guide there are many detailed tables containing lists of many fields which contain information which you will almost never need. What you must understand, though, is that you should train yourself to look any console program this way. You should approach to this information not like to a fiction book, where you may not pay attention do details and still understand it pretty well. You should approach all those data as mathematical formulas, where every single symbol has its meaning, and even more so, if you do not understand what particular symbol means, you will not be able to go further.

Sometimes it is perfectly okay to left something unexplained, but make yourself a present of going deeper, even if it will be every so often. Give yourself a present by making research about this particular utility, understand what it tells you and why. If you will do this, if you will look deep inside, your understanding of an Operating System (Linux in our case) will increase dramatically.