Preface

The graphical user interface, or GUI, is designed for the average user and provides most of the necessary features needed for user interaction. Your smartphone doesn’t have a user-accessible command-line interface, or CLI, because it’s aimed at the average consumer. You are only able to access basic features. But you’re not an average consumer. You’re a programmer, a software developer crafting the best code from the finest bits. With command line, you can do everything you can do in the GUI, and more—that is, if you know how.

In this book, you’ll learn the basics and use those basic building blocks to tackle more advanced tasks. One of the best features of the CLI is that you can turn those basic commands into scripts that you can execute, meaning you can automate common tasks with ease. That’s why popular programming languages and frameworks like Node.js, Ember, React, Elixir, Ruby, Python, and many others rely so heavily on the CLI. With this book, you’ll learn how to put this interface to work for you.