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A few summers ago, I was teaching a programming course to high school students with the Harlem Children Society (written up by WNYC in this article). Since Unix was so foundational to the lessons that were to come, I decided to condense my introductory Unix lecture and put it up on YouTube. Entitled Basic Unix Commands, it covers a bunch of core Unix utilities, like moving around the filesystem, copying directories, deleting files, etc. At the moment it has over 35,000 views, and people seem to really like it.
I spent hours on it, mostly because I kept re-recording the dialog, thinking my voice sounded funny, and freaking out the night security guard by seemingly talking to myself. In an effort to expedite the process, I wrote a script that used the text-to-speech capabilities of my Mac to make videos in a robotic voice, given a text file of dialog and a bunch of images from a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation. I wrote up a bit of info on that tool here, and used it to make a bunch of videos, many still on Unix tools. Here’s the latest which I made last night, on Unix tips and tricks to make your computing life faster. Weirdly enough it has a Jurassic Park theme throughout, probably because of sleep deprivation.
The full set of Unix ones can be found in a YouTube playlist, and covers additional topics like wget, head and tail, and wildcards so far:
Hopefully somebody finds these useful, though the time investment is small. I can usually bang one out in a few hours (usually during wee hours of the night). Anyway, happy coding!