Great, now the missing link is SQL. Why are none of the online code schools teaching such an essential skill required for web development?
Because NoSQL!
Learn the Command Line
91–100 of 110 posts
Re: Learn the Command Line
#92If you're interested in more, I recently wrote a short book about learning Bash scripting: https://gumroad.com/l/datascience In the book, I use "adventures" to demonstrate Bash concepts, where I guide the reader through using the command line to answer questions such as: What's the average tip of a NYC cab driver? Is there a correlation between a country's GDP and life expectancy? etc
Awesome! I wrote something related: http://datascienceatthecommandline.com
Re: Learn the Command Line
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just putting this out there - as a teacher, I have seen the importance of repetition. My students would benefit from the repetition at the end of this. Whether they know they'd benefit or not. Like scales on a piano.
The very reason that I became interested in programming is the ability to eliminate repetition. Instead of solving math problems, I could make a calculator program. Instead of typing something out many times, the computer would do it for me. Type once, run forever. That was an amazing revalation. If I had learned programming through mindless repetition, through typing the same thing over and over again (As codecademy…
I'd say eliminating repetition is meta-programming, rather than programming. It is one of the things that set experienced programmers apart from beginners.
Re: Learn the Command Line
#94Re: Learn the Command Line
#95Very good beginners course! Thanks guys.
Re: Learn the Command Line
#96Lately I've been butting heads with some seriously anti-command line people. I'm not sure if this is a growing sentiment, or I'm just advocating CLI usage more as time goes on. Anyway, glad to see this. I'll be sure to recommend it to whomever I'm preaching.
I can often navigate to a file in a GUI faster than I can "cd users/Nadya/documents/work/2015/08/24/important/file.txt" [0] Or I could open up my GUI, click "work" from my side nav selections and navigate through 2015/08/24/important/ and click my file to open it. I can even open two directories and ^x^v into another directory. Or drag/drop to move. Rather than "mv file.txt ../../25/file.txt" I think it's important t…
CLI is better for when you know where you want to go, but it sucks for exploration. It takes much more effort to learn how a file tree is laid out using the CLI than it does using a GUI.
It's much simpler to move your mouse and click once than to use cd + ls. (Never-mind the fact that half the time I go to use ll and oops, this is a super-user so none of my aliases work.)
OTOH, if you're always moving files from /stage to /live or /db to /backup, CLI is more efficient, particularly once you write a script to capture what you need to do.
GUI also comes out on top for anything where the CLI ends up just being a mock-GUI. For example, on OS X, there's no reason to use top instead of Activity Monitor, since they do the same thing, and AM lets you click the column headers to re-order things. Also, I know people love vim/emacs, but those are both better as GUIs than as pure-terminal programs.
Re: Learn the Command Line
#97If you're interested in more, I recently wrote a short book about learning Bash scripting: https://gumroad.com/l/datascience In the book, I use "adventures" to demonstrate Bash concepts, where I guide the reader through using the command line to answer questions such as: What's the average tip of a NYC cab driver? Is there a correlation between a country's GDP and life expectancy? etc
dude... was totally going to plug your book here :)
Haha thanks!!
Re: Learn the Command Line
#98If you're interested in more, I recently wrote a short book about learning Bash scripting: https://gumroad.com/l/datascience In the book, I use "adventures" to demonstrate Bash concepts, where I guide the reader through using the command line to answer questions such as: What's the average tip of a NYC cab driver? Is there a correlation between a country's GDP and life expectancy? etc
Awesome! I wrote something related: http://datascienceatthecommandline.com
Hey Jeroen! I really enjoyed reading your book, and highly recommend it for everyone.
Re: Learn the Command Line
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Seems like a good use-case for docker
At a previous job, we had a "technical task" which formed part of the interview process for junior sysadmins. It involved setting up a couple of servers, VPNing them together, and configuring appropriate routing so VPN clients could access a server on a remote network.
We used LXC for this, but that or docker is probably a sane approach. You get some (not all) of the separation you do from VMs with all the scarce resource requirements of different users. If you consider the implications carefully, you can even give users root inside these containers in certain circumstances.
Re: Learn the Command Line
#100Great, now the missing link is SQL. Why are none of the online code schools teaching such an essential skill required for web development?
Is knowing SQL still important for web development? I haven't used it in 5 years and feel I can land jobs regardless.
In many large web applications writing queries in your DBAL/whatever without being able to dive into the underlying query and understand what's going on, I'd say it's pretty crucial. For anything small (complexity or expected traffic) you can probably get by without?