[jjice]

> Practical Unix

I hope this is a required course. I wish it was a freshman year course for me. I had to pick Unix up on my own (and fell in love while doing so), but a lot of my classmates didn't, and it made group work in the future a bit of a pain. Not that it is there fault, but it would have been nice to lay down an OS framework for students instead of focusing solely on writing algorithms and leaving what SSH is to mystery for a lot of students.

[billti]

Not to be nit-picky, but I wonder if it shouldn't be "Practical Linux"? How many people work with Unix vs Linux these days? I would guess amongst the graduate demographic Linux is also probably a more recognizable and attractive term than Unix.

On the general point though, I totally agree. Even after nearly 30 years of working on Windows, learning Linux has been one of the best investments I've made over the past decade. No matter what OS you run locally, doing anything with the cloud, Android, Docker, etc. means understanding the basics of Linux.

[karpierz]

In my (limited) experience, the majority of engineers in the valley end up working on MacBooks, so Unix would be the lowest common denominator.

[xputer]

Yup, I somehow managed to graduate with a Master in CS without knowing what grep was...