TreeHouse Console Foundations by Jim Hoskins Course Review

I approached this tutorial with minimal Unix experience and having worked through Zed Shaw's command line crash course which can be found in Learning Ruby the Hard Way's appendix.  First off, I think we should acknowledge that Hoskins has a really hard job here.  Whereas many of the other courses have the user doing various things, the console on its own does nothing for us.

While you need working knowledge of the console (particularly for the Rails track I am on), demonstrating its use in a vacuum is at times pretty slow and tedious.  While other courses empower the student by creating with them, the console course does not really have a product.  Therefore, Hoskins is to be really commended for working through a tough tutorial and helping to show us some of the uses of the console.

Hoskins is neither deeply enthusiastically engaging nor wooden and horrible.  The deliver is fairly natural, though at times does feel more delivered than spoken.  One thing I did notice was that his work was a bit more natural.  He will make mistakes and do a few things he did not exactly intend.  I think this is pretty common and helps to humanize the experience a little bit.

In terms of the material, it is a nice companion to Shaw's quick crash course.  I finished Shaw's course in about 2 to 3 hours and I think I spent around 4 hours on this one.  Shaw will get you comfortable with basic commands and this tutorial takes you to the next level including particularly interesting lessons on installing programs, the mysteries of Unix user permissions, and even some awesome background regarding the background in Unix.

The lesson was quite easy to understand, I never found myself perplexed even as someone who touched Unix for the first time 3 weeks ago.  It has a nice Unix prompt set up in Workspaces and works really well.  If you stay patient, watch all the videos, and keep your attention focused, this lesson will not be difficult.  How well that translates to actual meaningful console usage remains to be seen, but I do feel pretty confident about it after working through both this one and Shaw's.

Through no fault of Hoskins, this just is not going to be a super fun lesson.  The videos are kind of long (some around 12+ minutes) and the quizzes in between are short and quite easy.  It felt a lot less interactive than previous lessons and at times I was really tired of watching and taking notes on videos.  As I said, mostly you are learning stuff that will come into play as you get deeper into the Rails track (or whatever other track this one is needed for).

Code Report!

Resources in Progress:
Total hours into Programming: 94 (2 since last time )
Total Weeks Programming/Hours per week: 4/23

Progress on Gaddis' Starting out with Python: Done With Chapter 1, Appendix A,B

Progress on Shaw's Learning Ruby the Hard Way: Finished Exercise 1-13

My Text game: 3 hours, 118 lines

TreeHouse (2173 Points, 27 Badges)

Code Academy Points: (729 points, 74 badges)

Progress on Hartl's Tutorial Ready to start Chapter 3! 

Resources Finished:
Josh Kemp's No Degree, No Problem 8/14/2015

Chris Pine's Learn to Program 8/9/2015

TreeHouse Make a Website Track 8/17/2015

TreeHouse Ruby Basics 8/20/2015
TreeHouse JavaScript Basics 8/22/2015
TreeHouse Console Foundations 8/24/2015 

Code Academy Make a Website Course 7/29/2015

Code Academy Ruby Course 8/5/2015
Code Academy HTML and CSS Course 8/24/2015