I think it is different than CSS here. With CSS I could never really understand how it worked and each new browser released introduced new concepts that added m

I think it is different than CSS here. With CSS I could never really understand how it worked and each new browser released introduced new concepts that added more and more corner cases to the mix. On the other hand, with shell scripting after a while I got a decent mental model of how things worked. It is just that there are some bad design choices that make it very easy to shoot yourself on the foot. For example, word splitting "feature" of POSIX shell is the source of many of the pitfalls in the list and the solution in those cases is always the same -- always quote your variables. By the way, check out Shellcheck if you haven't already. It can detect many of these common pitfalls and the error messages have a link to the explanation so it also works as a learning tool.