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So I set up a VPS for the first time this week, here's how it went: 1. Shell? SSH? Wtf is this? Console? Huh? Why am I using something that looks like DOS, it'

So I set up a VPS for the first time this week, here's how it went: 1. Shell? SSH? Wtf is this? Console? Huh? Why am I using something that looks like DOS, it's 2013! Where is the GUI and menus?! So I learned about Shell/SSH, connected to my server, root and all that stuff. 2. Navigating folders and directories - dear god, this was a nightmare. I never used 'cd \' since '98 and that's only cause I wanted to run DOS games. 3. Kept seeing all these commands with '-' that makes installing extensions seem oh so easy! I wanted APC for PHP, stared at this page (http://pecl.php.net/package/APC http://pecl.php.net/package/APC) for an hour, trying to figure out what to do. Googled like mad. Searching for anything. Learned about "pecl install APC", nope no luck. Then I was told to compile it from source. Yeah, I know exactly what that means! Spent the next 4 hours trying to understand why phpize wouldn't work! Oh, I wasn't doing it from the right directory. -_- I mean, I'm slowly beginning to see how it all fits together but none of the education sites teaches you this stuff! It's like learning cooking recipes when you don't know how to turn the stove on, or what a stove even looks like. Or what's the difference between gas and electricity stove, how to turn on the tap to get water, etc. You learn a great recipe, know all the ingredients and the cooking time down to the second, but when it comes to use the tools and actually cook? Nope - cause I don't know how to turn on the stove or know what a stove looks like! (I know this is an extreme analogy) I wish tutorials would start with projects and setting it up from scratch. If you're going to show me how to do something localhost, you have to show me how to do it on a server (and set up) as well or else I'll never be able to make that connection. (Well not never, but makes it harder) Oh, editing files in the terminal is a blast too :P http://amath.colorado.edu/computing/unix/vi/ http://amath.colorado.edu/computing/unix/vi/ This saved my life that day. So…I definitely vote for teaching the environment before programming. PS: I did eventually install APC…after an entire day :P Now I'm trying to find and learn about setting up master/staging/production (and what it all means). Edit: Just to give some context of why I needed VPS - I wanted root access so I can make a wiki have clean URL (rewrite) and figured why not, learn about VPS. Then that's where I realized I need to learn 10 other things to do this one single thing. The APC was a suggested caching option to improve the site, and trying to do that also needed me to learn more stuff. So it's all kind of ties together when you're trying to accomplish a (seemingly) tiny thing.

bpatrianakos 14y ago
I half disagree. If you want to learn to be a sysadmin then learn to be a sysadmin. If you want to learn to code you learn to code. People who want to learn to code want to know what to type that'll get the computer to spit out whatever it is they want it to spit out. Mixing in environment stuff like you describe is just going to complicate things and turn people off entirely. Furthermore, most operating systems already have enough of the basics installed that you're able to get up and running with simple programming pretty quickly anyway. Learning to develop locally and deploying to a live server are very different. Yeah, both run just about identical software but the process is different. Locally, someone who's learning will install MAMP or xampp or something or copy and paste a line of code to get homebrew or rvm on their machine. There's a 50/50 mix of comfortable clicking around the GUI and typing in the terminal. If you're just learning and go right to the vps I think you're jumping the gun. The system may be the same but it takes some experience before you realize that what you were comfortable with when clicking around is almost the same thing you're doing in the vps over ssh except you have to know which command to run rather than clicking "install". Beginner books always have a section dedicated to setting up your environment and sometimes take you all the way through deployment. Articles online don't necessarily need that as they mostly assume you'll find that information elsewhere and only concern themselves with the task at hand - coding. Beyond all that I think that your frustrations are something you'll be grateful for in the future when you do get it. I knew how to code before I knew how to run a server. If I had learned the server stuff first and didn't quit then I wouldn't have understood why I was doing these things and I wouldn't have the knowledge of how everything from the language I was using to the server to the OS all worked together which is invaluable. If I were blindly following instructions on how to set up a lamp stack I wouldn't know that hey I don't need these apache modules or oh I can disable this ini setting, etc. On one level I get your gas stove/kitchen tools analogy. But as someone who understands these things now, on another level I don't think it fits. These topics are so incredibly broad and complex that it makes sense not to lump them together. Besides, there are plenty of places where you can just plop your code and have it run from shared hosting to PAAS's like Heroku and such. In the end its like the article says - these challenges are what'll teach you. I don't know any good programmers that simply memorized how to do things without having to earn the knowledge of how something works through tons of failure.

bpatrianakos 14y ago

I half disagree. If you want to learn to be a sysadmin then learn to be a sysadmin. If you want to learn to code you learn to code. People who want to learn to code want to know what to type that'll get the computer to spit out whatever it is they want it to spit out. Mixing in environment stuff like you describe is just going to complicate things and turn people off entirely. Furthermore, most operating systems already have enough of the basics installed that you're able to get up and running with simple programming pretty quickly anyway. Learning to develop locally and deploying to a live server are very different. Yeah, both run just about identical software but the process is different. Locally, someone who's learning will install MAMP or xampp or something or copy and paste a line of code to get homebrew or rvm on their machine. There's a 50/50 mix of comfortable clicking around the GUI and typing in the terminal. If you're just learning and go right to the vps I think you're jumping the gun. The system may be the same but it takes some experience before you realize that what you were comfortable with when clicking around is almost the same thing you're doing in the vps over ssh except you have to know which command to run rather than clicking "install". Beginner books always have a section dedicated to setting up your environment and sometimes take you all the way through deployment. Articles online don't necessarily need that as they mostly assume you'll find that information elsewhere and only concern themselves with the task at hand - coding. Beyond all that I think that your frustrations are something you'll be grateful for in the future when you do get it. I knew how to code before I knew how to run a server. If I had learned the server stuff first and didn't quit then I wouldn't have understood why I was doing these things and I wouldn't have the knowledge of how everything from the language I was using to the server to the OS all worked together which is invaluable. If I were blindly following instructions on how to set up a lamp stack I wouldn't know that hey I don't need these apache modules or oh I can disable this ini setting, etc. On one level I get your gas stove/kitchen tools analogy. But as someone who understands these things now, on another level I don't think it fits. These topics are so incredibly broad and complex that it makes sense not to lump them together. Besides, there are plenty of places where you can just plop your code and have it run from shared hosting to PAAS's like Heroku and such. In the end its like the article says - these challenges are what'll teach you. I don't know any good programmers that simply memorized how to do things without having to earn the knowledge of how something works through tons of failure.