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Learn the Command Line

codecademy.com

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Re: Learn the Command Line

#101

Post by butwhy »

anonuser910 wrote: post #82
butwhy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr "omg I'm scared of new people learning how to program because it threatens my job. I learned the hard way looking through old textbooks and new entrants shouldn't get to use a nice new service to learn because I didn't have that available to me when I started!"

Also, as I stated in my post, I don't think CodeCademy actually works that well at all, so your suggestion that I'm envious of new people because they have access to CC when starting out while I didn't is groundless. I tried one of their courses two years ago and found it extremely shallow. If someone asked me today how to learn JavaScript, I would probably direct them to Mozilla's tutorial or to the Rhino book and w…

So you don't personally like CC based on your experience of it 2 years ago, so what? You don't have to use it. It just so happens that a lot of people really like their service.

If it outputs bad candidates, as you claim, then you should have no problem beating them in job interviews.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#102

Post by photosinensis »

cortesoft wrote: post #31
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.

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

No, it's not intended for me. I'm actually evaluating it for other people (I work with people that are totally lost in Unix shells) and playing with its terminal to see exactly what I've been given.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#103

Post by photosinensis »

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.

After you get past that, maybe some basic scripting would be in order.

The course needs more content, through and through. You've got a solid beginning, though.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#104

Post by nekkoru »

Nadya wrote: post #44
izolate wrote: post #41

Lately 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…

Why not create a series of (edit: autoupdating) symlinks like ~/today and ~/yesterday? Just a thought.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#105

Post by ccallebs »

cbd1984 wrote: post #70
marssaxman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classic Mac OS did not even have a command line interface, so people who began their programming careers in the Apple world between 1984 and 2001-2002 would only have had reason to learn how to use one out of curiosity, or if they happened to be doing cross-platform work with a Unix system. I had a wee bit of Apple II experience prior to the Macintosh, and I suppose you could call the various BBS interfaces I use…

> While I've never been part of the Windows world myself, it has always seemed to me that the DOS command line plays a much smaller role there than the shell does in the Unix world. Indeed. It was possible to meaningfully use the command line up through, say, Windows 98 SE or so, once Windows XP hit, it became a relic, stuck in the command.com era while the actual OS kernel moved away from the DOS-hybrid of the Windo…

PowerShell is a really cool, powerful tool. Though, it's really more of what you'd consider a modern REPL to be than a conventional shell. It takes an OO approach to scripting as well.

For some reason, I seems like it's a hard sell for a lot of .NET developers. A substantial number never leave Visual Studio and old habits are hard to break. I left that ecosystem many years ago, but still try to keep up with it.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#106

Post by [deleted] »

nekkoru wrote: post #104
Nadya wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why not create a series of (edit: autoupdating) symlinks like ~/today and ~/yesterday? Just a thought.

[deleted]

Re: Learn the Command Line

#107

Post by harrumph »

raboukhalil wrote: post #28

If 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

Purchased -- and I'm in love. Thanks very much for writing!

Re: Learn the Command Line

#108

Post by bphogan »

cwt wrote: post #79
bphogan wrote: post #69

Earlier 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.

I believe in good repetition. But what is good repetition? Nano on a dot file 5 times? For the command line it should involve commands that will save people time. Teach them: 1. how to use find and grep, and other commonly used commands. 2. introducing them to vi and explaining why people use it (instead of nano) 3. user configuration with a brief on the FS structure (what is in etc, usr, opt, etc...) 4. lastly, but…

You do it as many times as it takes to become muscle memory. That's a lot of times for some people.

I suspect many on this thread have forgotten what it was like the first time they did command line stuff. I teach this stuff in a classroom setting twice a yeaer.

This repetition is sorely needed.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#109

Post by bphogan »

ndrscr wrote: post #86
bphogan wrote: post #69

Earlier 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…

Everyone seems to be missing this bit - it is about those fundamentals first. The end goal is eliminating repetition. But it takes repetition to get to that point because that's how the human brain works.

I observe this with students who use IDEs in the beginning. Some "experienced" developer tells them they need to use an IDE because it "saves time."

Then the students tab-complete their way through code and don't really understand, or remember, what it is. The connections, the pathways to memory, aren't as great.

And not everyone learns this way. If your first program out of the gate was a program to do math for you, before previously learning anything about programming, then based on my experience you are an outlier, someone with a gift and natural affinity for this field.

Bottom line: if this was too repetitive for you, you weren't the target audience.

Re: Learn the Command Line

#110

Post by raboukhalil »

harrumph wrote: post #107
raboukhalil wrote: post #28

If 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

Purchased -- and I'm in love. Thanks very much for writing!

Thank you so much, great to hear you like it!
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