I have blogged before that knowledge of command-line tools is essential to take the next step in programming productivity. I think it would be useful to provide simple tutorials for these powerful tools, starting with find. I hope you agree, and would appreciate your feedback via the contact page or in the comments.
Tutorial
If you’re on Windows, I would recommend installing Cygwin to bring the power of a real shell to your OS. Let us start with a simple example and build upon it:
I need to give you a bit a background so you can see what my priorities are when setting up my favorite browser. I am a computer programmer that deals with web stuff as well as back-end stuff. I am NOT a designer in general, mostly a coder. I am running Firefox 3 beta 5 (not RC1 yet) since it is compatible with almost all of my extensions.
Step 1: My Theme
NASA Night Launch – This has little effect on my productivity but I get asked about this more than anything else. I like the cool blackness and the fact that this theme is Firefox 3 compatible.
Clients do not know what they want. Managers do not know what they want. When you prototype, you learn about the constraints you are going to face and your audience learns what they can have and what is impossible. NOTE: Try not to use your prototypes for production code, they are meant to be prototypes. Learn from them and don’t just….
2. Copy the code
When you copy code one of these scenarios is likely to occur: either you don’t fully understand what it does or you may know but don’t think about refactoring it to be better because you expect it to just work. I know many of you out there see this all day long: someone copies code because they are lazy and don’t correctly create an abstraction, and they end up violating the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. Now when rules change, you have multiple pieces of code to change. Unfortunately, it seems that people who copy code also tend to believe that they should…
