Nice work, but this looks kinda use-less (or not as useful as it could be) to me. Not in terms of 'you will never need it' but in terms of 'hey I just learnt something and now I can do X what I could not do before' :-/
It just tells someone who wants to learn the CLI how to do the things they already know to do with some file browser. What I am missing are the things you can do with the CLI only and which make the CLI so special e.g. pipes.
In general, it is kinda hard to chain GUI programs together and that is exactly where CLI tools are great. While I would certainly agree that it is too hard to start explaining what curl does, maybe coming with some process management example would be simple enough (many people know how to close some program via a task manager). Another good example might be to execute some command every few seconds (e.g. watch du -sh).
I don't want to be negative here, especially because I appreciate simple and straight forward tutorials, but I think that tutorial could be even more valuable with some better examples. Maybe in some part 2?
The purpose of this is not to show how CLI is cool, but rather to get them to take their first steps and show them that it's not scary. In other words, the goal is to get them to feel familiar in this environment. For this goal, showing them how to do things they already know but in this new environment is specially important to warm them up to it. If you show them stuff like pipes, you might impress them, but you're not lowering the hurdle.
EDIT: Put in another way, the intended audience is not people you need to convince to use the CLI, it's people that already want to try it, but find it scary.
Well, if you know that audience its cool. I was never afraid of the CLI, it was more that I could not find good use-cases and therefore stuck with the GUI tools, even when I knew how to use cd, touch, mkdir, mv, cp, ls, etc.
I think the biggest break-through was when I was starting to write scripts as it taught me the rather complex syntax of conditions and loops (complex because whitespace is so important), but I would agree that scripts are a bigger beast.
I think people who try the CLI but are not shown the true power of the CLI will eventually return to their GUI tools as they don't have to remember strange commands and read long man pages.
The target audience is beginners who are just trying to learn programming and things like that.
Pipes are cool, but that's more intermediate/advanced. Maybe there will be another zine in that vein! For now, Tracy is working on an intro to Git zine which is higher priority.
It just tells someone who wants to learn the CLI how to do the things they already know to do with some file browser. What I am missing are the things you can do with the CLI only and which make the CLI so special e.g. pipes.
In general, it is kinda hard to chain GUI programs together and that is exactly where CLI tools are great. While I would certainly agree that it is too hard to start explaining what curl does, maybe coming with some process management example would be simple enough (many people know how to close some program via a task manager). Another good example might be to execute some command every few seconds (e.g. watch du -sh).
I don't want to be negative here, especially because I appreciate simple and straight forward tutorials, but I think that tutorial could be even more valuable with some better examples. Maybe in some part 2?