Developer Skills: Certified Unix operating systems
The herd switched to OS X from rival operating systems over an extended period. And part of this (a big part, according to many programmers) was when Apple released OS X. For the last 15 years Apple's operating system has been built on top of Unix, the command-line OS that powers much of the world's filesystems and servers. Indeed, OS X is a fully-featured Unix operating system (certified as Unix by the Open Standard Groups). Not even modern versions of Linux, such as Mint or Ubuntu, are certified Unix operating systems (they are based on GNU instead of Unix). "The [Unix] shell is very important for a programmer," says Jessica Su, a CS Ph.D. student at Stanford. "It lets you run programs in almost any language without using a specialized IDE. It's also important if you want a job at a tech company since many companies make their employees work on Unix-based systems. "You get to learn the UNIX shell while having a computer that works. If I couldn...