[Missing Semester of Your CS Education] Lecture 1

This post is written by YoungJ-Baek

1. Preface

To explain the background of this post, I should tell my major. I have majored Electrical Engineering. At first, I was interested in circuit or 5G. However, as time passed, I have been attracted to the programming. Most of all, signal processing including image signal processing was most attractive field. So, I wanted to major EECS, which is Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. However, I hit the wall so that I had to give up the academic and go to work for money. Fortunately, I love my job and my peers, but I always regret not to challenge for dream. Thanks to MIT, I try to fulfill my weakness of Computer Science background and want to be confident of myself as EE(CS) engineer.

2. Lecture 1

Lecture 1 is the overview of the course and brief introduction of Shell. I listen the lecture and follow if with my MacBook, which means I work in MacOS and some terminal application in App Store.

2.1. Shell

I watched the video with my soul-mate. She asked me some interesting and bright questions during the lecture. One of them was about Shell.

What is the difference of Shell in Windows, Linux, and Mac?

I have never thought about it seriously. So, it is first time to consider it deeply. In my opinion, Windows provide user friendly environment. So, they do not want users to access Shell frequently. Instead, they implement many things with their applications rather than make users type in Shell. In summary, PowerShell which is Shell prompt of Windows is limited of original Shell, but it is not because they are useless or incompetent, it is because of the philosophy of Windows I think.

Linux and MacOS provides much more freer environment. It is SandBox game in my opinion. A small difference between them is that Linux is much more freer than MacOS. It can have both advantages and disadvantages. Developers can do more things using Linux Shell, but they can also make their computer brick with the Shell.

By the way, it would be better to use Linux or MacOS to study Shell prompt. All the lectures are based on Linux, so using Windows can be an obstacle sometimes.

2.2. Details

To order your idiot computer, you should write some commands in your Shell. The lecture 1 introduced many commands such as pwd, cd, ls, and so on. Each commands will be described with their own posts.

Also, the lecture told how to understand the permission of the file or directory. It explained three parties and three digits.