Command Line Judo for GUI Addicts

Integrated Development Environments are great. My favorite IDE is a command line shell chock full of tools like grep, find, and wc, and a good editor. Seriously though, the ability to slice and dice on the command line can magnify the productivity of any developer, and opens the door on new skills. With power over the command line, your computer becomes a device you can drag race, rather than a device that spends most of its time waiting for keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Good developers know their way around a command line. Great developers know how to automate work away using command line tools.

In this talk we will go over several command line shells, talk about the “Unix Philosophy” of little programs that connect together to do big things, and learn about a whole bunch of those little programs. For those windows users in the audience, we will also go over Cygwin, a POSIX compliant shell and host of utilities that gives Windows users a useful command line.

About David Bock

David Bock is a Principal Consultant at CodeSherpas, a company he founded in 2007. Mr. Bock is also the President of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, the Editor of O'Reilly's OnJava.com website, and a frequent speaker on technology in venues such as the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

In January 2006, Mr. Bock was honored by being awarded the title of Java Champion by a panel of esteemed leaders in the Java Community in a program sponsored by Sun. There are approximately 100 active Java Champions worldwide.

David has also served on several JCP panels, including the Specification of the Java 6 Platform and the upcoming Java Module System.

In addition to his public speaking and training activities, Mr. Bock actively consults as a software engineer, project manager, and team mentor for commercial and government clients.

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