Learning the command line can be a difficult and intimidating task, but this book is designed to be your lighthouse in the modern computational storm. Unix is a 40 year old operating system that powers the internet, your phone, and the latest scientific research. This book aims to be a gateway to the world of computer programming, providing you with a set of tools that will allow you to scale your ideas. Even if you have no prior programming experience The Unix Workbench can help you build a solid foundation which you can use to build the next great business, discover a new innovation, or choreograph a ovation-inducing ballet.

This book begins by helping you get access to Unix, followed by an introduction to how you can use the command line to navigate your computer just like you normally would with your mouse and keyboard. We will then discuss more advanced topics including how to do complex searches with regular expressions, how to configure your programming environment, and how to connect multiple programs together. We'll continue with an introduction to programming in the Bash language so you can write your own programs for Unix. Finally we'll discuss how you can share your code with Git and GitHub, and we'll explore how you can set up your own cloud computer for free.

This book also serves as an educational experiment. By reading this book you will learn how you can edit this book using the Unix tools that we'll discuss. If you think this book can be improved in any way, instructions for making changes and suggestions are included.