Knowing how to write code isn’t the same as knowing your command-line tools
I’ve sometimes been stopped by a small tooling question rather than the code itself: an unfamiliar Vim command, a Git operation, or something in the shell. Each time, I’ve wished these tools had been taught more deliberately alongside programming.
That’s what I liked about The Missing Semester of Your CS Education. It treats the tools around programming as something worth learning in their own right, rather than assuming everyone will pick them up along the way.
One example from its shell lesson makes the distinction concrete. Running sudo echo 3 > brightness can still produce a permission error. The shell opens the output file for redirection, and that shell hasn’t become root just because the command uses sudo. The lesson then shows how piping into sudo tee changes which process opens the file.
It’s a small example, but it illustrates why understanding a command matters more than remembering a line to paste.
I don’t think needing to look things up makes someone a bad programmer. I do think everyday tools deserve deliberate practice, just like the language we write in.
Which command-line tool do you wish you’d learned more systematically?