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Learn the Command Line

codecademy.com

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Re: Learn the Command Line

#31

Post by cortesoft »

photosinensis wrote: post #26
r3bl wrote: post #14

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), ty…

vim is available, and if you know how to use it, it doesn't seem to know what text editor you're using. At least, that was my experience. But I'll also agree that the edit bash_profile stuff was repetitive. I might have preferred something in there about symbolic links or ownership and permissions.

If you already know about vim and how to use it, is this course really for you?

Re: Learn the Command Line

#32

Post by artursapek »

photosinensis wrote: post #26
r3bl wrote: post #14

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), ty…

vim is available, and if you know how to use it, it doesn't seem to know what text editor you're using. At least, that was my experience. But I'll also agree that the edit bash_profile stuff was repetitive. I might have preferred something in there about symbolic links or ownership and permissions.

We have actually been thinking about expanding on this content with more advanced stuff, including symlinks and permissions.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#33

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Learn the Command Line

#34

Post by colechristensen »

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?

To me and a lot of people, the commandline is already natural language.

`ls -a` is just a contraction for "list all"

Your nine words aren't any more expressive than my two, and that's the problem. There's not much value in being able to express simple commands with long sentences (with often many interpretable meanings)

There _could be_ value in natural language processing for some very complicated commands, but it would have to be fairly intelligent before it would be useful.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#35

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Learn the Command Line

#36

Post by nonprogrammable »

hsitz wrote: post #20
nonprogrammable wrote: post #11

I completed this a few days ago. Good enough to make me want to put Linux on my Macbook again. How I missed thee.

Doesn't your Macbook already have a unix command line?

Yeah, I just meant for the nostalgia. As in, I don't usually use command line on my Mac but Linux more or less necessitates command line use at various points.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#38

Post by sigjuice »

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.

IMHO, A Linux VM for every user sounds like overkill. A separate *NIX user account should be sufficient for teaching things like "Navigating the Filesystem", "Configuring the Environment" etc.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#39

Post by LordIllidan »

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.

Just curious - did you think of using an in-browser emulator?

E.g. http://bellard.org/jslinux/ ?

Re: Learn the Command Line

#40

Post by wyclif »

artursapek wrote: post #32
photosinensis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vim is available, and if you know how to use it, it doesn't seem to know what text editor you're using. At least, that was my experience. But I'll also agree that the edit bash_profile stuff was repetitive. I might have preferred something in there about symbolic links or ownership and permissions.

We have actually been thinking about expanding on this content with more advanced stuff, including symlinks and permissions.

I'd encourage you to make it more incrementally advanced, i.e. progressively more difficult toward the latter third of the course.
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