UNIX

Also on the go at the moment is the UNIX training course, I am currently mid way through attending 3 training days, an introduction, intermediate and a shell scripting class.

If you are still reading this at this point then the chances are you know what UNIX is, for any non IT people its reasonable for you to see UNIX as the underpinning language of modern network and server systems, generally accepted as being superior to MS Windows, its highly versitile, robust and can be made into all sorts of wonderful things (commercially things such as Apple macs, Playstations, Android mobile os's) and its Open Source, its free.

The first class was of course introductory and covered the basic commands, the class was part lecture part self teach with a murder mystery that could only be solved by navigating around the server finding files, decrypting files, running functions and scripts and was all in all a good ice breaker to the language if you hadn't studied it before. Thankfully I could remember the UNIX module from University.

The second lesson was noticeably more advanced and showed us more functions and tools that the language offered. This class also introduced "Piping" which is the method of chaining functions together to achieve a desired output, thats the best way I can explain it without a UNIX lesson on my blog.

This was followed by another murder mystery, again using the techniques we were taught during the day and again it was noticeably harder.

The next session is the one I'm looking forward to, Shell scripting is the method of writing non compiled scripts that can be executed on a UNIX system. I'll update more once I've had the course.