The only thing I think would make it even better would be if we could make it an interactive course online, since so much of these details about shells, commands, etc. are things which happen in a computer context anyway. If several of the major could collaborate on a common research-programming tutorial and release it openly, it would be a huge win for more fields than just computational linguistics.
I've seen some related links to put shells in the browser, so it's more than just an academic speculation; I think one could put the site together with under a thousand hours of programmer time at this point. Hosting costs might be a concern, but application development is probably not too difficult.
Good idea, I'd love to enable online learning for this type of material. In the meantime, I'm putting handouts for the first unit ("UNIX") online, and the second unit ("Python") will use iPython notebooks. There may be Coursera (etc.) offerings that cover similar material, but I haven't looked into it yet.
The only thing I think would make it even better would be if we could make it an interactive course online, since so much of these details about shells, commands, etc. are things which happen in a computer context anyway. If several of the major could collaborate on a common research-programming tutorial and release it openly, it would be a huge win for more fields than just computational linguistics.
I've seen some related links to put shells in the browser, so it's more than just an academic speculation; I think one could put the site together with under a thousand hours of programmer time at this point. Hosting costs might be a concern, but application development is probably not too difficult.