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UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers
will I be able to do it ?
Post 4480 by Neo on Wednesday 25th of July 2001 05:26:04 AM
07-25-2001
Administrator
Microsoft networking is 'graphical click and popup based' and assumes that the user is not interested in learning about the detail of how the actual network processes work. The overal philosophy is 'users don't care about the details, they want it to be spoon fed to them'.
UNIX is built on a quite different philosophy. One of the tenants of that philosophy is that the user needs to "command the system" and not "the system commands the user." This results in the need to learn an incredible amount of detail about the underlying processes and structures.
This board assumes that newbies are self-motivated with a strong desire to learn. We cannot motivate nor advise folks on how to make a mental shift from the mindset created by point-and-click experience.
I can tell you that on the server-side, point-and-click is normally risky and takes much more time than understanding the command line side. However, on the desktop side, point-and-click has merit.
I'm very suprised to read you are an electrical engineer and a C programmer but are not inclined to dig in a learn UNIX from the posts you reference.
Perhaps a nice expresso machine and a month in isolation with your favorite UNIX platform? This is how most of us got started
UNIX is built on a quite different philosophy. One of the tenants of that philosophy is that the user needs to "command the system" and not "the system commands the user." This results in the need to learn an incredible amount of detail about the underlying processes and structures.
This board assumes that newbies are self-motivated with a strong desire to learn. We cannot motivate nor advise folks on how to make a mental shift from the mindset created by point-and-click experience.
I can tell you that on the server-side, point-and-click is normally risky and takes much more time than understanding the command line side. However, on the desktop side, point-and-click has merit.
I'm very suprised to read you are an electrical engineer and a C programmer but are not inclined to dig in a learn UNIX from the posts you reference.
Perhaps a nice expresso machine and a month in isolation with your favorite UNIX platform? This is how most of us got started
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LEARN ABOUT BSD
learn
LEARN(1) General Commands Manual LEARN(1) NAME
learn - computer aided instruction about UNIX SYNOPSIS
learn [ -directory ] [ subject [ lesson ] ] DESCRIPTION
Learn gives Computer Aided Instruction courses and practice in the use of UNIX, the C Shell, and the Berkeley text editors. To get started simply type learn. If you had used learn before and left your last session without completing a subject, the program will use information in $HOME/.learnrc to start you up in the same place you left off. Your first time through, learn will ask questions to find out what you want to do. Some questions may be bypassed by naming a subject, and more yet by naming a lesson. You may enter the lesson as a number that learn gave you in a previous session. If you do not know the lesson number, you may enter the lesson as a word, and learn will look for the first lesson containing it. If the lesson is `-', learn prompts for each lesson; this is useful for debugging. The subject's presently handled are files editor vi morefiles macros eqn C There are a few special commands. The command `bye' terminates a learn session and `where' tells you of your progress, with `where m' telling you more. The command `again' re-displays the text of the lesson and `again lesson' lets you review lesson. There is no way for learn to tell you the answers it expects in English, however, the command `hint' prints the last part of the lesson script used to evaluate a response, while `hint m' prints the whole lesson script. This is useful for debugging lessons and might possibly give you an idea about what it expects. The -directory option allows one to exercise a script in a nonstandard place. FILES
/usr/share/learn subtree for all dependent directories and files /usr/tmp/pl* playpen directories $HOME/.learnrc startup information SEE ALSO
csh(1), ex(1) B. W. Kernighan and M. E. Lesk, LEARN - Computer-Aided Instruction on UNIX BUGS
The main strength of learn, that it asks the student to use the real UNIX, also makes possible baffling mistakes. It is helpful, espe- cially for nonprogrammers, to have a UNIX initiate near at hand during the first sessions. Occasionally lessons are incorrect, sometimes because the local version of a command operates in a non-standard way. Occasionally a lesson script does not recognize all the different correct responses, in which case the `hint' command may be useful. Such lessons may be skipped with the `skip' command, but it takes some sophistication to recognize the situation. To find a lesson given as a word, learn does a simple fgrep(1) through the lessons. It is unclear whether this sort of subject indexing is better than none. Spawning a new shell is required for each of many user and internal functions. The `vi' lessons are provided separately from the others. To use them see your system administrator. 7th Edition October 22, 1996 LEARN(1)