What Do You Wish You Had Known?

[Cabhan]

Hey again. I just wanted to thank all of you. While most of the ideas I was already planning to cover, you did give me a lot of new ideas, so I'm very grateful for that.

The format of the class is a 6 day class meeting for 1.5 hours each day (originally it was 9 days for 1 hour, hence the original wording). The classes are for students and will be after a regular full day of classes. The course is run by our chapter of the ACM (so student-run), and this particular class will likely never be taught again, though other students may teach Linux courses in the future.

So again: thank you all! I'll let you know how it goes.

[drl]

Hi.

One of the training aids that I used was an adaptation of the figure relating user, shell, applications, and kernel. If you have O'Reilly's Unix Power Tools, it's in the early section of the book. For example, I have at hand the 3rd edition, and it's on page 8.

In class I draw that set of empty boxes on the board, then talk through it. The students follow along, and it helps hold attention because they need to write the contents of the boxes, and the connections among them. I believe this was crucial in getting the students to see the big picture.

I think most of us agree that the power of *nix lies in its design as a tool-building platform. That's why I rarely discussed anything about GUIs except to login and get a terminal window up. Then we launched into a topic, the students sometimes needed to enter commands as I lectured, and they did a number of exercises after the discussion.

The topics in my course were:

Commands for learning - brief exposure - file, touch, rm, date, cat, echo, sleep, and ps. These allow one to set the stage to more easily learn other commands.

The big picture - as noted above.

Syntax for commands - role of whitespace, meta-characters, quoting, redirection, grouping.

Commands for navigation and reporting - man (the most important command in *nix), the filesystem hierarchy, cd, pwd, uname-hostname, uptime, who, df.

Outside commands - operating on files (ignoring content) - ls, rm, mkdir, rmdir, cp, ln, chown, chgrp, umask.

Inside commands - commands that deal with content - cat, concept of pipes, grep, file, diff, pagers (more, less, etc.), sort.

Editing - interactive modification of a file - the most basic subset of vi, :q, :q!, ZZ, i, a, o, O, x, dd, u, r, R, h j k l, ^F ^B G 1G - those allow editing of any file (perhaps not with utmost efficiency, but capability is there).

The shell - prompts, variables, stty, job control, history and re-running commands.

Network and security - access to other computers - passwords, interactive, file transfer, browsing, etc.

Topics had extra material in the notes and in the exercises to account for students who could drink (more) from the fire-hose.

The beginning of a new day had a brief review of what we had earlier discussed.

After this introductory course, the intermediate course discussed topics beyond this, regular expressions, scripting, awk, etc. The courses were 8-hour days, 2 days for intro, 4 days for intermediate. For those who wanted more depth, we had single-day electives in vi, awk, etc. We had an emacs course, but no one ever signed up for it (I usually mentioned that the difference between the vi and emacs people was from being from the east coast and west coast, so that here on the Mississippi, we allowed the use of both ). From there, there our courses were mostly in languages and system administration.

I don't think I could fit all the topics here or suggested in this thread into 9 hours, so you'll need to rely on your expertise and the expectations of interested parties to design the course. In my opinion, whatever you choose for topics, the most important parts of a course are the exercises, and an agreeable / accessible / acquainted person of whom to ask questions.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl
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