Bash programming - Introduction

How to start programming in Bash, without prior programming experience? And making sure it will be fun?

Basics

• Shebang, script files, make files executable, terminal screen, editor (I use Sublime Text)
• Display Hello, world!
• Variables (scalars): Assigning & displaying
• Commenting (#) and documenting in a structured way
• Receiving user input & processing it - E.g.: Ask the user for his/her name and displaying something like Hello, <name>!
• Comparisons, e.g., check for empty imput and take appropriate actions
• Flow control: Loops. E.g.: Display the numbers from 1 to 100 on the screen; With a step function; Backwards
• Pipelining. E.g. ls > tmp.txt
• Grep; Pipelining
• Passing arguments to scripts
• Functions
• Evaluating commands

Personal basic

Stuff that is relevant in an early stage for me personally right now (2023.01), but may not be relevant for others:

• ln: To make shortcuts on the Desktop to whatever I often use
• Man pages. E.g., man ln
• Arrays & associative arrays: I use these a lot in translating webshops
• WP-CLI

Explore further yourself

• https://www.google.com/search?q=learning+programming+bash+from+scratch

Things I get energy from

I love the power of automating stuff, and doing things in a breeze that for non-technical people would be a hell of a job. E.g.:

• WordPress: Update all prices with one small script
• Remove whitespace around pictures with just one command
• Using mmv to update lots of file names at once.

Why I like this? Somewhere in 2022, I did a personality test focused on primary motives and one of my main motives was confirmed to be individualism (as if I didn't know that already): I very much want to be authentic and independent, and automating is a great tool for this. Additionally, it's a selling point and even a production factor: Thanks to a growing library of functions, I can do more and more tasks under conditions (time, price) that non-programmers cannot compete with.

Some other technologies that fit this pattern - I'm not familiar with all of these:

• Pipelining: Using the output of one command as the input for another command
• Regular expressions: Advanced pattern matching - Can be very powerful in all kind of situations
• APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)
• Webservices. Example: Using Translate shell for translating stuff
• AI (Artificial Intelligence).

Sources

• https://dev.to/ahmedmusallam/bash-from-scratch-learn-enough-bash-to-write-your-own-scripts-189f
• https://ryanstutorials.net/bash-scripting-tutorial - Good
• https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/bash-scripting-tutorial - Good
• https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/shell-scripting-crash-course-how-to-write-bash-scripts-in-linux/ - Good, but maybe too detailed
• https://linuxconfig.org/bash-scripting-tutorial-for-beginners - Bit too ambitious for a beginner