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Having shared these zines with beginners IRL (hi, I did the cover!), I can say that the abstract nature of the terminal makes it less intimidating but does not
by shazow 8y ago
Having shared these zines with beginners IRL (hi, I did the cover!), I can say that the abstract nature of the terminal makes it less intimidating but does not remove from the content.
I imagine for an intermediate/expert audience who has established an intimate relationship with the intricacies of the actual UI, screenshots could work fine. For people who barely have an idea of what this thing is, cutting the cruft in a friendly way is good.
Print one out and give it to a friend, see what they think. :)
- pvg 8y agoOne thing that can be made obvious in a drawing is the distinction between what the user is expected to type, what's already on the screen when they start typing and what the output after they've finished typing (and hit enter) is. For some reason, the drawings in this intro don't do that. I also probably wouldn't give a friend unfamiliar with the command line a tutorial that teaches 'rm' and 'sudo' this early on.
- shazow 8y agoOne of the goals of the zine is to get people up to speed with what they need to know to learn programming--good to have a goal while you're learning, right? When setting up Python (and really most languages), you end up needing things like sudo. Really it was one of the missing pieces of content that beginners needed to get into Tracy's other books like https://hellowebbooks.com/learn-django/ https://hellowebbooks.com/learn-django/.
- pvg 8y agoYou don't need sudo to set up Python (and probably most commonly used languages). But beside that, I don't think rm and sudo are the third and fourth thing you should be typing into a terminal, whatever your end-goal. If you haven't seen it before, an ancient but worth-thieving-from example of a beginner programming manual is 'The Applesoft Tutorial'.