What changes should we make for our 5.4 release?

[gvwilson]

Please use this issue for discussion of changes we should make by mid-August 2015.

[ChristinaLK]

These can each spawn more specific issues to be worked on:

• read through learning objectives + confirm that lesson content matches. Do we need new objectives? To remove others?
• Look at callouts + what purpose they serve. Are there points where callout text should be re-integrated into main text or moved to discussion.md, reference.md?
• In general, having more a list of interactive exercises - either for instructor demo or student participation, not just multiple choice questions. Pull from what people have actually used in workshops!

[ChristinaLK]

Will tag other already open issues that we'd like to complete w/ the milestone

[ChristinaLK]

Issues I would really like to see addressed are:

• moving homedir callout ("another useful abbrevation") from 02-create to 01-filedir (Move "Another Useful Abbreviation" for the begin #171)
• better handling of man pages / getting help (Recommendation to Instructors about man because it doesn't work in Windows #55 Move man page for 01-filedir.md #176)

[ChristinaLK]

Also, after train the trainers today, a "solution" page for the exercises, with solutions and - more importantly - what concept the question is trying to test and what misconceptions are attached to the wrong answers.

[gvwilson]

• Maxime Boissoneault asked about the use of '/' with the downloaded files in this message on the discussion list.
• Emily Davenport had the same question.
• Raniere Silva explained what he does.
• Amanda Charbonneau explained why she finds the whole 'Files and Directories' page difficult to teach.

[spthm]

Slightly off topic(?), but I'd like to second Raniere's most recent message. Pretty much the first thing I get students to do after showing them pwd is

export PS1='\u@\h:\w$ '

and then, if they want it to be permanent,

echo "export PS1='\u@\h:\w$ '" >> ~/.bashrc

(FYI this means your prompt is user@host:<current directory>$, and note the space after $. Some wifi networks seem to make the \h host variable unintelligible, at least on mac, so it might be better to use Raniere's simpler variant.)

I haven't actually taught the shell lesson; this is based on my experience with an introductory programming course at my university: students are fine navigating folders, but forget where they are, and thus end up losing track of files in directory structures of the form

problem1/
    solution1.sh
    problem1/
        solution1.sh
    problem2/
        solution2.sh

problem3/

You see the 'problem'...

Modifying the PS1 value is somewhat esoteric, but useful. I believe it would be worth adding a little bit about having the current directory in your prompt to the material.

[mboisson]

Going through the tutorial, I find that there is a problem with the final loop that Nelle runs, i.e.

for datafile in *[AB].txt; do echo $datafile; bash goostats $datafile stats-$datafile; done

The problem is that if you run the loop twice, it will actually take "stats-$datafile" as the input for the second run, as well as the original files.

A slightly more complex, but correct loop, would be
for datafile in N*[AB].txt; do echo $datafile; bash goostats $datafile stats-$datafile; done

[mboisson]

I also find that it would be useful to have a directory with the exercises at the end of the lessons. Instead of having "Suppose that ls initially displays:" ... and having people who need to think about what the answer might be, they can actually try it for themselves.

[rgaiacs]

@ChristinaLK, @gdevenyi and @gvwilson What do you think of collecting Nelle’s examples as a capstone exercise? I like the Nelle's text but I never taught it due time limitation.