Who this course is for
You see commands fly by in tutorials (cd, ls, npm install) and copy-paste them without really knowing what is happening. You have never opened a terminal in your life, or you opened one in a panic because a README told you to "run a command". This course gives you the basics without detour: what a shell is, how to compose commands, and the traps specific to Windows.
Once these foundations are in place, the other courses (Claude Code, Git, package managers) become much more approachable. None of them block on this one: you can start them in parallel and come back here when a specific point trips you up.
How to follow it
- Linearly the first time: each lesson builds on the previous one.
- By targeted lesson after that: come back to look up a specific syntax.
- Practice in parallel: everything you read, type it for real in your own terminal.
All commands are copy-pasteable, stamped with their last verified date, and work on macOS, Linux, and Windows (via Git Bash).