Scripting language to learn

[bms5...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I currently use Jenkins at my workplace for automated builds. My job title is Build Manager, so I do daily baselines/releases. I have just started using bash scripts for creating released files. I would like to learn it more in depth. Does anyone have any online tutorials or books that are helpful in bash scripting? I'd also like to learn a general purpose scripting language that might come in handy. I notice that most jobs out there have listed Python, Perl, and Ruby. Is there one that anyone would recommend? Python looks easy to learn out of the three, but I was wondering if there was a common language used in configuration management or another scripting language that would come in handy with Jenkins. Thanks in advance.

-Bill

[martinda]

Hi,

A bit off topic but here it goes.

Bash scripting: Learning the bash shell, O'Reilly Media, and http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

GNU Make is still very much alive and very powerful, it is language agnostic. Many people do not see that GNU Make is mostly a declarative language for describing software build processes (targets, prerequisites and recipes) using templates. GNU Make deals with individual files really well, but has no built-in concept of packages and releases like Maven for example.

I would learn Groovy as a modern scripting language because it is portable (it runs on the Java Virtual Machine), it can use any and all the Java libraries (I love argparse4j), it has a sane syntax that other people can read (unlike scala - and I don't mean to start a flame war here but in my case this matters). But Groovy is really slow if you need high performance regular expression, in which case I find Python strikes a good balance between being readable, having a nice OO model with enough libraries and having very good performance. I wrote in Perl for many years but not anymore and I don't miss it.

Good luck,
Martin

[Ioannis Moutsatsos]

Groovy should be on your list if you are using Jenkins. 

It is natively supported throughout the Jenkins ecosystem and you can write easy to read powerful scripts that will run on any platform.

Happy scripting!

Ioannis