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DancinJack
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Re: Linux for College Students

Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:48 am

I know literally no one that uses the Git GUI. No one. I've never even seen it.

When I was in college, we just did everything from the CLI. It's just how you worked in LInux. Like JBI said, there are a lot of advantages. Learn it, love it. CLI for life.
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vishalsuvagia
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Re: Linux for College Students

Sat Sep 30, 2017 4:04 am

Redocbew wrote:
There's a graphical git client for Windows also. It kind of sucks, and you can tell that portions of it were ported from Linux if you know what to look for, but it works ok for simple usage. Once you start doing merges and other more administrative tasks, then yeah, you're probably better off dropping back to the command line anyway.


If you have not used tortoise-git (https://tortoisegit.org) for Windows, try using it, any time better than the default GUI git client provided in git.
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Redocbew
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Re: Linux for College Students

Sat Sep 30, 2017 12:31 pm

I don't use the GUI either, and I wouldn't recommend it for anything but the most basic commit and push/pull usage. If someone wants to forgo the GUI and use the command line instead I'd definitely recommend it regardless of their level of experience, but that's local to their machine. The rules are a bit different there compared to a live web server. :P
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uni-mitation
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Re: Linux for College Students

Sun Apr 29, 2018 5:12 pm

derFunkenstein wrote:
For anybody wondering what a Linux class in a college setting might look like, it's following pretty closely to The Linux Command Line by William E. Shotts, Jr. We're going through a chapter a week, and I just wrapped up chapter 6. Homework is based on the topics covered.

The book is free in PDF format, and if you're interested in learning about Linux and surviving on the command-line interface (which seems like a must for web developers these days), I think I'd recommend it. There are 30-some chapters so at our current pace we won't finish the book, but by the time we're done I expect I'll have additional familiarity with different facets than I did before. Seems like a worthwhile course and definitely a worthwhile book.

The homework is equal parts "do this stuff on the command line and take as screenshot of your history" and "fill in the blank with what command matches this definition".


^^^ tripleplusgood!!!

Every time someone asks me about Linux I save myself the trouble and just send them a link to that book. In my opinion, it should be part of curricula for anything Linux-related. If I was a professor teaching that class I would simply dump that book on them, and build some sand-boxing exercises.

The book does a great job of teaching syntax and of giving you the tools to figure out stuff out if you are not sure how to use them. At the end of the day, Linux has come a long way, but when it comes to doing any meaningful work, a well-versed knowledge of the command-line is a must. What blew my mind was this whole piping of input-output thing. It is so useful.

uni-mitation
 
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Re: Linux for College Students

Sun Apr 29, 2018 8:40 pm

uni-mitation wrote:
...

What blew my mind was this whole piping of input-output thing. It is so useful.

Holy thread necro! :lol: But since we're here...

It isn't the piping alone that makes it so useful (the Windows command prompt supports piping too, after all). The real power is in the fact that the entire UNIX/Linux CLI ecosystem is designed from the ground up to leverage it seamlessly.

One example of the sort of thing I'm talking about: You can clone a raw disk (or partition) across a network to a remote disk with a one-line CLI command that uses dd to read the local disk and pipes its output to ssh; ssh in turn pipes its output to a remote copy of dd to write the remote disk. Want to create a compressed remote disk image (in a regular file) instead of cloning to a raw disk? Just add gzip to the end of the pipeline and redirect gzip's output to a file. Nearly all of the common CLI tools "just work" together like this.

You can also rapidly develop complex pipelines by taking an incremental approach. Start with the first command of the pipeline, and run it to see if it does what you want. Then hit up-arrow (command recall), add the second command in the pipeline, run and view the output again. Lather, rinse, repeat until you've got the whole thing constructed. A pipeline can even produce additional shell commands (by leveraging tools like sed), which are in turn piped to another copy of the shell... or additional commands can be invoked based on data in the pipeline via the xargs tool.
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