Save yourself a future headache and learn the command line

For a software developer, knowing how to navigate through the Terminal command line is very, very important. Starting out, you may think that it's not that big of a deal. But if you ignore this crucial "soft" skill for developers, it will come back to haunt you at the worst time. To give you an example, a friend of mine who was doing freelance work was in the process of migrating a software product from his local machine to a remote server. His client told him that he would have to do the entire migration through SSH (Secure shell). For those that don't know, SSH is a safe way to remote into another computer from your local machine and make changes to the remote machine. But here's the kicker, SSH requires you to access the remote machine from a terminal and use commands from the terminal. Having minimal experience with the command line, my friend struggled to do even the simplest of commands such as copying moving files, running and testing his changes, and keeping track of where what directory he was in within the server and navigating to the correct locations. It made what should have been a 2 hour job an 8 hour job, costing my friend hundreds of dollars in time he could've been working on other jobs that he had been contracted to do or looking for more work.

After hearing this, I decided it would be a good idea to review what I did and didn't know how to do on the command line. I started looking for a good book that would take me through all the basic commands so that I would be able to navigate the terminal with ease. After a little bit of searching I found the book
Learn Enough Command Line to Be Dangerous: A tutorial introduction to the Unix command line (Learn Enough Developer Fundamentals Book 1) by Michael Hartl. If you are new to the command line, this is a great place to start. I went through the entire book and did all of the exercises and I have to say that it was totally worth it. When I code now, I constantly try to use the terminal to achieve everything that I can to keep my mind fresh and barely need to use the GUI interface at all.

I recommend learning the Unix command line because both Linux and Apple's OS X use it. If you only have a Windows computer do not fret, you can install the Ubuntu app in the Microsoft store or install a Linux virtual machine on your windows computer to play around with the Unix command line. Starting out, I would not advise to learn Windows command line because frankly I don't find very many people using it but if you insist, at least install PowerShell to help you out.

That's it for today and thanks for reading!