Ask HN: Should I invest time on mastering the command line or the Jetbrains IDE?
Oh my, this is adorable!.. You&#x27;re worrying about something you really should not worry about. For a beginner, the marginal benefit of either this or that is negligible.<p>This is akin to trying to shave milliseconds off of your 100m sprint by carefully choosing aerodynamic clothes and running shoes when your time is 20 seconds. Nobody should worry about that until they&#x27;re under 10 seconds. In that case, the problem isn&#x27;t the shoes, it&#x27;s probably the 40 pounds of fat the beginner runner is packing and should deal with <i>first</i>.<p>Worrying about productivity at this stage is a 10 year old wondering about the best way to shave his beard.. <i>He just doesn&#x27;t have that problem yet</i> and should be doing something else..<p>It&#x27;s pretty hard for a beginner to get started and the amount of tools is overwhelming and could be distracting from what the beginner should <i>actually be doing</i>, which is reading and writing code.<p>I&#x27;m telling you this because I&#x27;m a textbook case of this kind of &quot;Oooh, I want to learn X.. What&#x27;s the <i>best</i> book?&quot; and the spend a year <i>looking for</i> the best book to learn X, instead of spending that year <i>actually learning</i> X.<p>I wasn&#x27;t like this when I was a child. I had a computer, it had something called BASIC. I didn&#x27;t understand a word of English. I looked words in a dictionary and guessed the most part, copied code examples, ran them, changed stuff, deduced the role of each from the side effects, and just started doing it. Children are like that, they get stuff done. They&#x27;re great hackers. When we grow up, we start trying to be &quot;clever&quot; about things and doing it &quot;smartly&quot; and get stupid in the process getting less done and learning less.<p>&gt;<i>Try to master the Unix command line and a terminal based editor</i><p>About that.. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1168&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1168&#x2F;</a><p>I think it&#x27;d be more productive for you to know enough to get you <i>comfortable</i> and know your way around it as soon as possible: yak shaving is never the point unless you&#x27;re trying to unwind in which case, shaving animals can be.. relaxing.<p>Here&#x27;s something to get you started but just that:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learnpythonthehardway.org&#x2F;book&#x2F;appendixa.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learnpythonthehardway.org&#x2F;book&#x2F;appendixa.html</a><p>Here&#x27;s the most pertinent advice I could give you: Get internships. You probably live in a country that actually has software companies where people rely on software for most things.. Get internships at these companies. Real life experience, with real developers and real problems to learn the stuff you can&#x27;t find elsewhere. Internships.<p>Also, side projects and reading code.<p>You think you&#x27;re slow and a noob? I&#x27;m 29 and have been coding for 20 years on and off and I&#x27;m still a noob who can&#x27;t code to save his life. I&#x27;m the slow guy here, not you!<p>All the best!