I always put a comment at the beginning of nontrivial commands, so accidentally hitting enter prematurely doesn't do anything and so I can check it once it's written out before removing the comment and hitting enter.
Linkers and Loaders by John Levine is not exclusively about Linux, but it does a great job of walking you through in great detail common formats for executables on Linux and the work it takes to get a program running. The manuscript chapters are available at http://www.iecc.com/linker/. I loved the book so much I bought a hard copy.
Common programming idioms, for example iteration, are hard to express in a SQL query, and I think if you try to force iterative ideas on this declarative language the result is frustration or fear.
The need to be able to express yourself iteratively was a motivator for Microsoft's DryadLINQ - a programming language for distributed computation that has SQL-like constructs integrated into C#, giving you a high-level language with some of the declarative benefits as well as some of the imperative benefits (including more natural ways to express iteration).
I think if you try to force iterative ideas on this declarative language the result is frustration or fear
But fortunately we have (tail) recursion to fight back in most declarative languages. Which is something that's completely missing from SQL. There should be a way to express recursion in SQL queries in my opinion.
Datalog is more or less equivalent to SQL with recursion. I don't know of any serious, database-backed implementations but there are a lot of in-memory implementations and some interesting extensions for distributed databases.
