Summary and Setup

Curriculum for a short workshop teaching skills required for working with web data at the command line. The lesson is visible at: https://acceleratingdigitalskills.github.io/cli-and-web-for-music/.

Prerequisite

Before joining this training, participants should have experience working with graphical software for browsing the web and a basic understanding of the kinds of data that are available online that can support music research.

This lesson guides you through the basics of file systems and the shell. If you have stored files on a computer at all and recognize the word “file” and either “directory” or “folder” (two common words for the same thing), you’re ready for this lesson.

Lesson Objectives

After following this lesson, learners will be able to:

  • to run simple command-line executables with simple arguments at the terminal that: navigate a computer’s filesystem at the command-line, create text files and directories, and output the contents of simple text files to the terminal
  • to provide more complex arguments and options to commands, and redirect/save output to files and/or stdout
  • to describe how computer systems communicate with each other over the Internet
  • to describe the components of URIs and construct well-formed URIs themselves
  • to construct common request types and handle responses for a simple (RESTful) web API over HTTP
  • to use command-line tools to request, inspect, and store multiple resources from remote servers, given a URI
  • to explain the difference between HTML, CSS, and Javascript and describe some of their uses in contemporary Web sites/properties

If you are interested in helping us develop this material, teaching the curriculum, or attending a workshop, please contact Eamonn Bell.

This lesson is built with The Carpentries Workbench.

FIXME: Setup instructions live in this document. Please specify the tools and the data sets the Learner needs to have installed.

Data Sets

Download the data zip file and unzip it to your Desktop

Software Setup

Details

Setup for different systems can be presented in dropdown menus via a solution tag. They will join to this discussion block, so you can give a general overview of the software used in this lesson here and fill out the individual operating systems (and potentially add more, e.g. online setup) in the solutions blocks.

Use PuTTY

Use Terminal.app

Use Terminal