I started a work placement the other week at a telecommunications company as part of my uni degree. And it turns out all the servers run, not linux (which would have been awesome), but Solaris, which is close enough that quite a lot of my Slackware knowledge carrys over.

Never let it be said that spending several days perfecting and playing around with a linux install is a waste of time! Learning is never a waste of time of course, but it's nice to see the payoffs come so quickly. I'm a big step ahead of some of the other work-placement students who have never used anything but Windows. I'm very glad I didn't chicken out and choose Ubuntu, but took the plunge with a more involved distro in Slackware.

Now I just need to augment my bash scripting with some Perl and Python.

Good for you!

I've found that the programming I did on my Apple //e (20+ years ago) has stood me well in my career. For what I'm doing now, I find that having used Applework 1, 2, and 3 was helpful in understanding a lot of things that are going on.

Bucky