What's the point of learning console foundations?

Hi Zoe,

It will seem more relevant once you do git and sass.

Hi Zoe

I think you are probably right about the console and design and there not being a relationship but the track is Web Development and the console is an essential tool for a Web developer.

You need to consider what you are trying to achieve, pure design, by this I would mean you will create the way the site should look, design layout, style colour scheme and associated images. If this is what you want to do only you may find that other parts of the Web development track are also not for you.

However if you want to take those designs and implement them for the Web by turning them into HTML, CSS and image files (plus others) then the Web development track is what you need. If this is the case then the console is absolutely essential for managing your files on your Web server, you may never do this as a Web dev, your sys admin may handle it all (yeah right) but having the knowledge is useful for the time you do need to get new files onto the Web server, plus loads of other things.

Most servers are unix based, thus knowing how to get around and doing basic tasks would be very helpful.

Here is how I use the console in web design:

I have a friend who lives in Chicago, I'm in New York. We are working on a site together. He does a bunch of stuff and pushes his work to github.com. He does this through the console using git commands. I then use the console and pull his work down from github. I add my css and a few image files. I save my work and then push it back up to github where he can then pull my work down.
There are other ways, but using the console, git commands, and a site like github or bitbucket, is how most people work together on projects. Also, pushing to a repo like github is a great way to save your work in case you dump redbull all over your computer. It also allows for easy branching and tracking the history of your project. All of this made much much faster using the console. It's all about productivity.

When you remote access a web server that is on production you often times do not use VNC or whatever because it has a lot of overhead on the resources and will use SSH with putty or something else. Hence the command line. Also it would be nice to not have to have a full time sysadmin to act as a full time nanny for things a dev should be able to do on their own.

Also Cygwin on a windows box is a very very popular setup for devs. That way you can use a lot of powerful unix utilities.