Getting help and digital notebooks

We’ve made our lives a tiny bit easier by automating tasks with our shell:

• We can run commands on files automatically using find,
• We’re able to filter files using grep, and
• We’ve got a better handle on how to use the command line.

But yeesh, there are so many programs to use on the command line. And every program seems to be different in terms of how you actually use it! How am I supposed to remember all this stuff?!

Some people have superhuman abilities and can remember all these things, but I (me, Franklin) don’t have any superhuman abilities. We’re going to spend some time getting help from various places:

• The programs themselves (short, but helpful),
• Offline documentation about the programs (comprehensive and correct, but sometimes inscrutable), and
• Online (overwhelming, and sometimes wrong).

We’re also going to look at confirming that the help we are getting appropriate for an academic setting.

Finally, we’re going to look at digital notebooks, where we can combine both text and code into one structured place so that we can simultaneously document and look at an alternative model for exploring and experimenting with code as opposed to writing code in an editor.