I saw this piece on Learning Unix from Miguel de Icaza that brought back memories. Michael is a well known developer that is working an open source implementation of .NET called Mono. He worked at Microsoft and continues to bring .NET to other platforms, but he primarily works on Unix based systems. The post laments the lack of basic Unix knowledge and tricks from many of the developers he meets. His recommendation is a few books and tutorials to learn shell commands, emacs, and more.

Those bring back memories for me since I learned to use emacs early in college. I went through tutorial and enjoyed the editor much more than vi and learned to take advantage of shell commands for quick scripts or tools that would make my programming tasks easier. Those skills helped me when I moved to the DOS/Windows world and scripted many tasks, and even helped in SQL Server with the scripting tasks is SSIS and SQLCMD. As I look over PowerShell scripts these days, I find myself seeing the same constructs as I saw in Korn shell, but with different syntax.

Read the rest of "Big Gaps" at SQLServerCentral.