[OS:N:] bash intro for high school students?

[Jay Scherrer]

On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 09:00 -0400, Jeff Kinz wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 01:35:20AM -0700, Dan Koren wrote:
> 
> #1 - Brian and Dan - Please use bottom posting.
> #2 - Outlook/MS email clients are broken, you can fix them
> with these patches:
> 
> outlook express: http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/
> 
> 
> Outlook: http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/
> 
> > From: "Robert Citek" <rwcitek at alum.calberkeley.org>
> > >
> > > What book or other resource would people recommend for introducing
> > > high school students to the bash shell?
> > >
My favorite was the Linux programing Bible: by John Goerzen
Altough teaching the subject of Shell programing using the diferent
shells it reinforced the basics with grep, awk, and sed.
> > > These are students that are familiar with the pointy-clicky Windows
> > > environment, and they've picked up KDE using Knoppix pretty quickly.
> > > But KDE can be awkward at times and some things have to be done
> > > within a bash shell.  I personally like the O'Reilly book "Learning
> > > the bash Shell," but perhaps that's a bit much to chew on for an
> > 
> > It would be nice to understand the reasons why one would
> > prefer bash to other shells, in particular with respect with
> > introducing high school students to computers.
> > 
> > Why bash rather than ksh or perl?
> 
> Perl is not a shell.
> 
That being said, these are also the roots of Perl.
So starting with the basics (grep, awk, sed) is fundamental even
for .sh.
> Perl (while wonderful) is not designed to be used interactively.
> You need one of the command shells for that.  One can try to use 
> Perl as a shell, but it quickly becomes apparent that the need to have
> everything be a complete program is much more awkward than the 
> "command line" mode of the shells
> 
This is not true. 
My respected instructor, Dr. Tim Maher will be publishing a great book
from Manning called "Minimal Perl" <http://manning.com/Maher> .
Minimal Perl is an attempt to show readers the effectiveness of what
Perl can do with as little as one line of code. 
> Why bash vs other shells?
> 
> ksh (which was my favorite in years past) is not available on all
> Linux or UNIX platforms.  Since it is not compatible with bash or sh
> (which are available on all Linux/UNIX platforms, a ksh user when
> suddenly finding themselves in one of those no-ksh environments will
> find that many of their scripts are broken and no longer work, or,
> worse, the script don't break but now behave differently in subtle
> ways that cause significantly different functionality.
> 
> It is much wiser, and you are giving up very little to stick with bash
> or sh.  (although I do miss "typeset -Z30" )
> 
> > 
> > IMHO the best vehicle for introducing high school (or
> > any other) students to computing is APL ;-)
> 
> Ah, yes - the original read-only language. ;-)  
> Now we use Perl for read-only ;-)
> 
> > > intro, or not.  Has anyone else introduced high school students to bash?
> Tons.
> 
Jay Scherrer