For those who’ve never used a command line interface and find them intimidating (one of my hurdles on the way to learning to program), I’d recommend Learn Code the Hard Way: The Command Line Crash Course. The exercises are designed to trip you up and force you to figure some things out for yourself, which has quickly increased my confidence and self-reliance so far.
I have not finished the book, but am already getting slightly addicted to “commanding” my computer to do my bidding instead of having to dig my way through windows explorer and context menus to get anything done. Am I right in thinking this may be good prep for migrating to linux?
Am I right in thinking this may be good prep for migrating to linux?
Yes. And the shells (the command-line program: normally cmd.exe on Windows and something like bash or zsh on Unix) on Linux/OS X/Unix are much much more powerful, so it’s even better.
(The Unix shells are actually (Turing-)complete programming languages and non-trivial programs can be implemented in them. Although this isn’t a good idea normally.)
(Edit: it seems that that book teaches you to use Powershell, which is similar to the Unix shells (i.e. it doesn’t suck), so this comment is probably irrelevant.)
For those who’ve never used a command line interface and find them intimidating (one of my hurdles on the way to learning to program), I’d recommend Learn Code the Hard Way: The Command Line Crash Course. The exercises are designed to trip you up and force you to figure some things out for yourself, which has quickly increased my confidence and self-reliance so far.
I have not finished the book, but am already getting slightly addicted to “commanding” my computer to do my bidding instead of having to dig my way through windows explorer and context menus to get anything done. Am I right in thinking this may be good prep for migrating to linux?
Yes. And the shells (the command-line program: normally
cmd.exeon Windows and something likebashorzshon Unix) on Linux/OS X/Unix are much much more powerful, so it’s even better.(The Unix shells are actually (Turing-)complete programming languages and non-trivial programs can be implemented in them. Although this isn’t a good idea normally.)
(Edit: it seems that that book teaches you to use Powershell, which is similar to the Unix shells (i.e. it doesn’t suck), so this comment is probably irrelevant.)
It is, although I’d seriously consider OS X instead of linux. You get the terminal, same as always, but it’s nice to have the amenities there too.