I awoke yesterday to see a lot of twitter notifications on my phone. Sometimes this happens when I've written a post on this blog, but I hadn't added anything for over a week. Turns out that the activity was triggered by this tweet by Richard Smith-Unna (@blahah404 on twitter):

I made a 'Command-line bootcamp' adventure for learning unix in the browser. https://t.co/IiDmqnCTDf #trendngs15 @kbradnam @denormalize
— ⓪ Rik Smith-Unna (@blahah404) December 2, 2015

As the screenshot below indicates, Richard has worked some amazing black magic to enable a single browser window to contain a fully interactive terminal as well as a file viewer/navigator; all alongside a (slightly modified) version of my original Linux bootcamp material.

This new interactive command-line bootcamp is a wonderful resource and means that the only barrier to learning some simple, but powerful, Linux/Unix commands is the availability of a web browser.

Richard explains a little about how he put all of this together:

The Infrastructure, including adventure-time and docker-browser-server, was built by @maxogden and @mafintosh. The setup of this app was based on the get-dat adventure.

Here is another contribution that I made to a UC Davis Bioinformatics Workshop that I helped teach last week. Adapting from some our much longer Unix & Perl Primer for Biologists, I made a short bootcamp that aims to teach the basics of the Unix/Linux command-line.

Unlike the Primer material that was written from the point of view of someone using a Mac, the new bootcamp course is written from the viewpoint of someone using Ubuntu Linux. Also, no example files are needed. The course is entirely self-contained and should take 1–3 hours to process (depending on your familiarity with Unix).

Download the PDF, view the HTML version, or work with the underlying Markdown file.

Current version: v1.01 — 2015-06-24

Learn my Linux Bootcamp…all from within a web browser window

Command-line bootcamp: learn the basics of Unix