[noisenotsignal]

I think it’s dependent on the person learning the material. My college had a similar course and it was also highly regarded as useful by students. However, while I found the course fun I already knew most of the basics from my research job, and the advanced stuff hasn’t really come up again even in work (e.g. fancy git or gdb commands), so I’ve entirely forgotten it; my biggest takeaway is probably ctrl r for searching in shell. But I can see why a guided intro would be really helpful to someone who had no experience or some trouble getting started learning this kind of material (which is very different from programming or computer science).

There’s probably an aptitude threshold past which the course’s value diminishes - don’t mean any disrespect to anyone, just trying to expand on your point. The top students either have already figured it out or will do so easily, so they might be better off doing something else with the time they would’ve invested in this. But for a lot of students learning about these tools and concepts can be a real force multiplier, more so than a random upper level course.