You can do a lot of stuff without ever touching the shell, and there's a good chance he's even used the shell before, just not in a Unix environment (probably W

You can do a lot of stuff without ever touching the shell, and there's a good chance he's even used the shell before, just not in a Unix environment (probably Windows, which is significantly different, though the transition isn't too hard). Besides, nobody said he was "experienced", just that he wasn't a novice.