A survival guide for Unix beginners | Hacker News Reader

A survival guide for Unix beginners

matt.might.net

61 pointsfogus13 comments

The guide doesn't quite achieve what it sets out to, i.e. showing a GUI user some concrete examples where the command line gives you more power. Instead the reader is presented with lists of fancy ways to access a shell (you realistically expect a Unix beginner to rent a linode.com server?!) and with semi-comprehensive listings of the root file system (as if e.g. "/opt, package-manager installed files" is some place where a beginner might profitably venture).

It doesn't help that "/opt, package-manager installed files." is wrong.

I don't remember what LSB says, but in my experience it's neither uncommon nor unreasonable for packages not provided by your OS vendor to install into into /opt.

True, you can download a deb or rpm from somewhere and it might install into /opt. However, /bin, /etc, /lib, /sbin, /usr, /var are all places where "package-manager installed files" go.

Agreed. I don't think the language is right for newbies:

"What is computing with Unix?

Unix is a family of operating systems and environments that exploits the power of linguistic abstraction and composition to orchestrate tasks."

That isn't a question a newbie would ask or an answer they'd understand. Instead, I think the following would have been (less accurate but) much more helpful:

"What is Unix?

Unix is just an operating system, like Microsoft Windows or Mac OS."

Know your audience!

His audience are CS students: As a professor, I worry that the upcoming generation of programmers is missing out on the Unix experience, and with it, the power it grants.

Your answer is too simple for them.

I think you overestimate CS students.

I don't think I do. I've TAed many CS majors. That level of simplicity is borderline condescension.

I don't think so either, but I do think that leaving it just at "Unix is an operating system" is likely to generate a good more confusion along the lines of "wait, I just have linux, where can I get unix?", "what do you mean linux is unix-like?", and of course "I thought I could use OSX for this".

It should be strongly mentioned that "unix" best describes a class of operating systems including "proper" unix systems like OSX and the "unix-like" systems like linux.

It's also important to divorce the students from that layman perspective of "operating systems are all that graphical shit I see on my screen". In fact, I think that might be the most important part.

Mac OS X is a kind of Unix.

This guide would probably hurt someone more than help them. It might work as a cursory overview, but even then -- my head would spin if this was my first guide to *nix.

It takes for granted that people understand, for instance, what's a filesystem and how it is basically organized. I don't think it'd be very useful for a beginner.

why is such a bad tutorial on the frontpage?

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