UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hi all, I Just set up Ubuntu Linux on my system using Vmware. I am kind of Confused. Do I First of all Learn how to navigate through the system and have a good grasp of its command before learning shell scripting.

Or can i learn both at the same time. I am also considering learning C.

Please from your collective experience which do you recommend that I learn first.

Thanks for your time and support.

As the shell you use is your window into the system and calls / runs all commands, both are heavily interleaved, and learning shell scripting is a natural consequence of using the system.

As you will see this is (almost) the same. Practically every modern shell is a command interpreter as well as a language and what you can enter at the command line you can also use as a line of a script - and vice versa.


As you can imagine from what i said above the answer to your first question is: yes, you can learn that at the same time. Notice, though, that programming is not only about learning a language, just like cooking is not about learning recipes. To cook well you need to learn some basics common to every recipe - cutting things, mixing well, usage of the various kitchen devices - and only then you may successfully cook some recipe.

Programming is similar: knowing the language is a critical part of it but even more critical is to know "how to do it" so that you end up with a well-structured program instead of a mess. This part is called "software engineering" and it applies to each and every programming endeavour, however small.

So, if you have no prior programming experience, instead of learning UNIX and shell scripting and C i suggest to concentrate on one of the languages (although both are a valuable bit of knowledge and will help you understand better the inner workings of a computer) and pick up some software development/software engineering skills alongside. Once you mastered that you can always learn a second (third, ...) language and apply the general knowledge you already have to it. It is better to be able to write well-written programs in a single language then to write bad programs in ten of them.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Thanks Guys for your advice. Will act in line with your suggestion.