Welcome back.
In this video we're going to start by talking about the command mind.
So this portion of our development environment and what we actually do here and what it's used for and
then we're going to introduce some of the early and most important command line commands.
Let's start by talking about what the command line is what the whole point of it is.
So far you've seen me type one instruction into the command line one command I typed node app.
Yes it looks like this.
And it won't work here because I don't have an access file but that's how I started my server when I
did the demonstration of the dog demo app.
That's just one of the important commands.
But there are quite a few more that we're going to learn about that we'll use through the rest of this
class.
Before we talk about them I want to read the introduction to this book.
This e-book called Getting to know the command line written by David Baum gold and it's a great resource
.
And if you have the time I definitely recommend that you read this entire ebook as well as this basic
command line tutorial that he links to right here.
But what I want to read is this paragraph here the command line is the ultimate seat of power on your
computer using the command line you can perform amazing feats of wizardry and speed taming your computer
and getting it to do precisely what you want.
Unfortunately the price of this power is complexity.
Nobody ever said that ruling your computer would be easy.
The command line is at its heart.
Simply a place where you type commands to the computer the computer is your obedient servant and will
attempt to carry out any commands that it understands.
Unfortunately the computer does not speak English or any other language spoken by humans although it
has recognizable elements in order to give it commands.
We must first start learning the language of the computer.
I like to think of the command line as this.
No frills direct interface to the core of our computer.
It used to be that the only interface that existed to work with the computer and interact with it was
through a command line.
In the early computers you would fire it up and it's a black screen with green text and there was no
visual interface and then some of the early Xerox and Mac computers came out which had visual interfaces
.
So that's where we get the mouse and the desktop and icons and things that we click on and basically
everything that we do with our computers.
Now as humans as non-developers we do through a visual interface but it's not just that the command
line is another way of interacting with a computer.
It's not that it's just an uglier simpler way where we just use the keyboard and text.
You could argue that it is uglier and simpler but more importantly it lets you do a lot more than you
can do with just your mouse so you can do everything that you would do with your mouse with visual menus
like making a new file or saving a file or running a file or opening an application.
You can do all of that through the command line but you can also do a lot more that you can't do without
the command line.
That includes things like starting a node server which is one of the important things that we have to
do in this class is start our javascript server and you can't do that by just clicking on things with
your mouse.
So that's one of the big reasons we're learning the command line.
The other reason that developers use it is that it's much faster.
Once you master it and once you know the important commands you can create files and run files and delete
files so much faster than if you're using your mouse.
Of course there is a learning curve and when you start out it feels like things take a lot more effort
to do with the command line and they do until you learn them and you feel comfortable with them.
I strongly recommend that you do the exercises that I'm going to give you but that you also practice
and use your command line in Cloud Nine as much as possible.