Introduction
1 Introduction
Command line programming is often viewed as an intimidating subject for many learning to code. It doesn’t need to be, many operations that you already do on your computer such as opening folders, running programs and editing files can be done using the command line.
1.1 What is the Command Line?
Interacting with the command line interface is a generic term we will use to describe something that can be more easily understood as “communicating directly with the computer”.
Typically when we interact with a computer we do so with a program, such as Microsoft Word, File Explorer or Google Chrome. What we are actually doing is clicking or typing with a Graphical User Interface, GUI. The GUI receives our instructions then passes them on to the computer.
GUIs are nice to look at and reduce the amount of working with the computer itself we need to do.
Using the command line interface we are able to directly interact with the computer.
1.2 Why should we use the Command Line?
Many processes are designed to be used by only the command line. With it, you can develop code in a more flexible manner, less dependent on other programs.
The command line does not replace these programs, but will be a useful additional tool for more advanced capabilities.