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Learn the Command Line

codecademy.com

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Re: Learn the Command Line

#12

Post by teach »

artursapek wrote: post #7
teach wrote: post #2

Do you really have to create an account to even see the first exercise? How times have changed at CodeCademy.

We teach things like bash by assigning each user to a virtualized Linux server. That gets really expensive and hard to manage when you give one to every anonymous user who hits the site (especially when our courses pop up on sites like HN). With that said, I have been wanting to change the UI to be less intrusive, so you can better see what you're signing up for.

Makes sense; thanks for responding!

Re: Learn the Command Line

#14

Post by r3bl »

I finished it last night and wrote a "review" in a mailing list, so I'm just gonna copy that "review" I sent last night if anyone's trying to figure out whether or not they should take this course:

I just finished it. It took me less than half an hour.

It was OK until I finished the 75% of the course. The last 25% were pretty repetitive: use nano to edit your bash config (they used .bash_profile as a config file), type something in it, close nano and use source to set the source of your bash config. I had to execute that same process at least five times and every single time the terminal session restarted so I couldn't use up and down keys to navigate between previous commands, so I had to type them again every single time. Plus there were constant bugs in the interface so I had to manually scroll the left sidebar to see the next task in like every challenge.

All in all, you're right, very basic, thorough, and a bit repetitive at the end. Nothing really left a wow effect to me, but I knew how to use 95% of those commands. Others might find it more useful.

P.S. I'm kind of surprised that they chose nano as a text editor. I expected vi, but I'm guessing they chose nano because it's more beginner-friendly.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#15

Post by djd3141 »

It's great to see a course to teach basic command line use, I tried this back when it was in beta and it was great. At the time I had also emailed their support team about some security concerns regarding the course and never heard back(I'm not infosec expert but I was surprised at a few things they allowed that would seem like security issues).

Re: Learn the Command Line

#16

Post by nyc_cyn »

What do people think about wrapping a Natural Language Processing interface around the command line (for educational purposes)?

For example: "Show me all of my files, including my hidden ones" --> "ls -a".

Good idea or not?

Re: Learn the Command Line

#17

Post by 0003 »

nyc_cyn wrote: post #16

What do people think about wrapping a Natural Language Processing interface around the command line (for educational purposes)? For example: "Show me all of my files, including my hidden ones" --> "ls -a". Good idea or not?

Can Cortana in Windows 10 do this?

Re: Learn the Command Line

#19

Post by artursapek »

djd3141 wrote: post #15

It's great to see a course to teach basic command line use, I tried this back when it was in beta and it was great. At the time I had also emailed their support team about some security concerns regarding the course and never heard back(I'm not infosec expert but I was surprised at a few things they allowed that would seem like security issues).

The servers are all sandboxed and isolated to you as an individual learner. What problems did you find? Feel free to email me at artur@codecademy.com.
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