I can always tell when the school year starts, because suddenly I have numerous orders for the paperback copies of THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE and THE WINDOWS COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE. Some professors have recommended them for their classes because they’re 1.) low-cost, and 2.) a good introduction to the topic.

If you’ve only discovered my writing recently (and by ‘recently’ I mean in the last six years), you might not know this, but I used to do a lot of tech writing. That was, in fact, my first successful attempt at writing for the Internet, tech blogging back in the second half of the 2000s. When I started self-publishing in 2011, I also wrote a bunch of tech books, and LINUX COMMAND and WINDOWS COMMAND are definitely the most successful of them.

Around 2018 I stopped tech writing due to lack of time and the fact that fiction turned out to be much more lucrative.

I occasionally get snide remarks from people saying “why pay $0.99 for an ebook, all this information is available for free on the Internet or YouTube.”

That is true. However, it overlooks the fact that people learn information in different ways. For some people, having the information laid out step by step in a book is the best introduction to the topic.

And the books are intended for absolute beginners. Part of the experience of being an absolute beginner is that you don’t even know the proper questions to ask, which means it’s hard to research and find relevant information on the Internet. It’s said that experts know what they don’t know, but if you’re a beginner, you don’t even know what you don’t know yet! LINUX COMMAND and WINDOWS COMMAND were intended to give people a good beginning foundation for the topic.

And since the books have been out for twelve years, I think I achieved that goal. I’ve gotten many emails from people who found themselves suddenly forced to use Linux (my favorite was from a teacher who unexpectedly found himself teaching a high school computer science class one week before it began) who said that the book helped them come to grips with the Linux command line.

I’m glad it was helpful, and I’m glad that the book has helped people, which is why I’ve kept them at $0,99 USD for over a decade now. And if you are learning the command line for the first time and you’re one of the people who bought book recently, I hope it is helpful.

-JM