Why cli is important

Programmers and developers alike should understand the power of version control. Try Git is a free learning tool on GitHub to help you toy around in Git without installing it locally. This is a guided tutorial for developers with absolutely no knowledge of version control. The difficulty of Git is memorizing version control commands while simultaneously learning the command line.

There are desktop apps that offer a GUI but they still expect you to understand the fundamentals of version control cloning, branching, merging, etc. On top of that, having the understanding of Git CLI will allow you to perform a more advanvanced Git operation that usually may not be able to do with the GUI. Especially if you work on a large Git respository, using the CLI would be more reliable and faster.

For a beginner the learning curve for Git can be steep. With regular practice it still might take a couple months to solidify the concepts. Frontend development has changed a lot in recent years. We also have task runners like Gulp and Grunt for automating tasks via Node. Both of those preprocessors require terminal commands for compiling code.

Granted you could setup a Gulp task to automate preprocessing, but this also requires command line knowledge. This installation process takes place almost entirely via the command line. The Django framework requires a similar CLI install process on top of pip , a free Python package manager. Also consider the process of setting up your own local server on Node. Bash is a widely used Unix shell as seen above. For Windows machines, you typically would use Command Prompt.

But when it comes to the command line, once you learn the commands, it is faster and more powerful to navigate around your computer.

In fact, there are lots of directions your computer can only execute if you tell it to do so via the command line. For instance git , an often-used software versioning system, was designed exclusively for the command line though someone has probably made a GUI.

Despite whether you have used it or not, I am sure most of you reading this have heard of Github or Bitbucket before. This is what Michael is talking about above. There are also many other features and benefits to using git. Many programs that you might want to use in your software that are hosted on say Github also require running some commands on the CLI in order to get them running.

But to be a full-fledged developer, you have to be comfortable working in the command line interface. Anyone with a computer can easily start using the command line, as it comes preinstalled with Windows, Linux, and Mac computers.

To open the command prompt in Windows, open the Start menu, click the Windows icon, scroll down to find the Windows System folder, and click Command Prompt. How to use command line interfaces begins with understanding the components of a command. The prompt depends on the details of your system and can be customized which is a more advanced topic. Commands: This is where you tell the computer what to do. Some examples of commands include:.

Options: Bits of info that customize how a command works. For example, for the Linux ls ls command that allows you to view a list of files and folders in a given directory, options include:. Arguments: An argument could be the string of characters you want to print or paths to files or folders. Your employer decides to invest in data analytics.

Several data professionals will be joining the team. You are tasked with making sure that their machines have everything they need to get started. If you can work with a CLI command language interpreter , you can write a few scripts that will install, configure and test everything automatically. More broadly, knowing how to use the shell gives you a second option for interacting with your computer.

You can always use the GUI when you prefer, but the command line can provide you with more direct power and control for those times when you need it. Text files are among the most common ways methods to store and handle data. Almost any data science project is going to involve some work with text files.

Being able to handle text files quickly and efficiently is thus a very useful skill for a data scientist. The shell has very powerful text processing tools like AWK and sed , which help with getting acquainted with files and facilitate data cleaning.

This is true both for working locally and remotely. When connecting remotely, GUIs consume much more bandwidth than terminals, wasting resources. Moreover, latency , i. To quote from this article by Nucleus Research:. That trend has accelerated, with only 4 percent of projects running on-premise in There are just a few popular shells bash, zsh, fish, ksh, tcsh, cmd, Windows PowerShell, etc.

For example, the bash commands that you learn in our command line courses will work on Unix-based machines like Macs and Linux computers. Even if their system doesn't use bash, it'll use something similar enough that you'll be able to figure it out. Research shows that mouse use plateaus rather quickly, while keyboard use, despite its steep learning curve, can be more efficient. Contrary to our expectations, most experienced users rarely used the efficient keyboard shortcuts, favoring the use of icon toolbars instead.

A second study was done to verify that keyboard shortcuts are, indeed, the most efficient method. Six participants performed common commands using menu selection, icon toolbars, and keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts were, as expected, the most efficient. Because it is so easy to track all of your activity on the command line, auditing and debugging is much easier. And, as previously mentioned, many of the bash commands you'll learn work in Windows' native sell options like the command prompt anyway.

That means that the command line skills you learn in these courses will be usable on virtually every computer you encounter including your personal machine, no matter what operating system you use. There is a misconception that using the command line requires you to know several hundred commands. Still not convinced?