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Development Tools

Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points
Posted by Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points

Course Request

I love the Console Foundations deep dive here on Treehouse. A lot of the web designers/developers, including myself, had to learn console the hard way. I think your courses on consoles gives the students here at Treehouse a good leg up on the learning curve. That being said, I think there are some great courses you could add to that deep dive that would flesh it out a little more and really help students round out their console skills for web development. So here's a list:

INSTALL AND CONFIGURE APACHE.

INSTALL AND CONFIGURE MYSQL( or some other version of sql).

SETTING UP A VHOST AND USING APACHE SITES ENABLED.

MAKING BASH ALIASES

WRITING BASIC SHELL SCRIPTS AND DEAMONS.

There are probably some other useful skills, but those ones would make good additions.

Ken Lauderbach
Ken Lauderbach
9,106 Points

Yes, I agree. To that point, courses on the installation and configuration of VirtualBox VMs, Linux (Ubuntu Server), Apache, MySQL, Rails, and PHP should be core foundations of the "Become a Web Developer" learning adventure. I think you would be hard-pressed to consider yourself a web developer without that knowledge.

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

Ken Lauderbach - Developers should be using Turn Key Linux VMs, XAMPP, cPanel & Webmin to get their dev/test environments up quickly setup so they can start coding. Once they've got everything setup move the app to a production hosting environment.

Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points
Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points

James Barnett - I agree with you that development environments should be out of the box solutions, but a lot of the websites I build also require me to set up the production environment as well. I don't work for a huge company that has dedicated server admins. As a result, I have to do a lot of server configuration for my clients production servers. I just thought that it would be a good thing for people to learn and that there are more developers, and future developers, who might find themselves in similar situations.

Ken Lauderbach
Ken Lauderbach
9,106 Points

James Barnett - If Turn Key VMs is what Treehouse feels is appropriate, I'm all for that as a new course topic. It would be great if Treehouse added an "Install and Configure a Turn Key VM" to the "Become a Web Developer" series and even better if Treehouse supplied a few of their own VMs we could download and install as part of the project files.

My main point here it that this entire concept appears to be a glaring omission in the developer series. I would like to see something that fills the void. I'm clearly no expert in what it should be, which is why I'm a Treehouse member. (Sorry to hijack your post, Andrew.)

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

Ken Lauderbach -

I guess I should have linked to it earlier. Turnkey Linux is the site under which someone has created and is distributing Linux-based virtual appliances.

Save time and money with 100+ ready-to-use solutions: discover and leverage the best free open source software. Deploy in minutes on bare metal, virtual machines, or in the cloud.

It just works: designed for ease of use, built and pre-tested by a community of experts.

Check out the virtual appliance library, they a are pretty awesome tool for quickly and easily testing and developing web apps.

1 Answer

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

A few thoughts:

  • Apache setup & MySQL setup are definitely more advanced sysadmin topics, there's a lot of Linux between Console Foundations and Configuring Apache & MySQL.

  • If you are already comfortable with Ruby (or a similar language) then picking up bash will be really easy. If you are new to programming then Bash might not be where you want to start.

If you are serious about learning Linux I'd suggest you check linuxacademy.com they have step-by-step videos and you get your own server to try things out on.

If you are already comfortable with Ruby & have done Console Foundations you can probably jump into their Bash scripting course.

There's also a course on Hosting Web Sites & Web Apps With The LAMP Stack which covers Apache. If your only experience with Linux is the Console Foundations course then you I'd recommend you do (at least most of) the LPIC1 Course Module (Course Modules are life Learning Adventures on Treehouse) to get comfortable in Linux.

Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points
Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points

I already know how to do all of the things I talked about above. I just think that they would make great additions to the treehouse curriculum. I know they have courses on moving websites to servers, purchasing domain names and a VPS, but I feel that some attention could be given to what to do after that.