That is actually the complaint I have seen most often with command lines - you need to learn so many commands at the very beginning to do anything useful; thus

That is actually the complaint I have seen most often with command lines - you need to learn so many commands at the very beginning to do anything useful; thus producing a steep curve. Once you have the absolutely necessary basic commands down (cd, pwd, ls, mkdir, chmod, and so on) you can easily add more commands gradually, as you need them.