Hello fellow nixers,
This thread is about sharing ideas and thoughts on the methods to gradually teach Unix.


These days I'm more often faced with a situation where I have to explain a Unix related topic to someone. However, this sometimes lead to a rabbit hole of ideas. Most of the time I slowly get used to finding a better and simpler way to approach the concept than to link to an online article or throw them off with the RTFM type of reply.

I've seen so many books supposed to be introduction to Unix, yet they're more advanced than what I would see the beginners I'm interacting with would be able to handle. Not to count university courses that plunge way too fast into things the students are expected to memorize instead of understand.

Thus the reason for creating this thread. I'm intrigued by how the members of this community would handle those kinds of situations. Have you ever been faced with one?

Personally, I find it better to start from an anchor point that is already well known to the person and then continue in a story-like manner. I can't access how efficient this is but it does seem to make it less boring. Moreover, lots of overview graphs seem to help. Same as with metaphors, but metaphors hit the limit pretty soon.

The question that remains is how to handle the teaching from scratch and how to move from one topic to the other.