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Hi Jim,

This may not be the answer you want to hear right now, but I think it might be helpful.

I think a developer needs to be somewhat agnostic about what operating system and tools he/she uses. That does not mean one does not have preferences. It just means that you can dig in and make most things work to your advantage.

So for example, I watched Nick Pettit demonstrate web developer tools in Chrome, and I followed along in Firefox. Not everything worked/looked the same, but most of it did. Chrome had some tools that Firefox did not have, so I learned that Chrome is a little further along in tools development (but not by much).

Another example: I recently installed Node.js on Windows and configured Notepad++ as an IDE to build and execute scripts. Just a cheap (free) tool I had laying around that I was used to. For a while, I had to fuss around and figure out how to invoke Node.js in the editor, work out environment variables, and figure out the NPM package handler. How did I know what packages I had already in place, and which ones I needed for a task? Where did the modules land, and could the Node.js environment path to them? It was all a grind initially, but I got it settled with a lot of Googling and bad guessing.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to think asynchronously. I feel like an old man: is all my procedural thinking now garbage? But I went through this years ago with Object Orientation, beat my head on it until it finally clicked.

So keep at it, work with your tools and they'll work for you. You'll have frustrations, but you'll know how to grind through them. You'll learn a lot, and before long start answering questions from other folks.

Good luck, take care, what you are trying to do is not easy!

-- Cal

Hi Jim,

First and foremost, take a deep breath. Feeling overwhelmed is a part of everyone's learning journey, and it's important to be able to take a step back from your frustration. These tools do work, though I can sympathize with the difficulties of getting git up and running on Windows. The easiest thing to do, I think, would be to just work in your Ubuntu virtual environment for now. The Linux command line interface is a lot more like the Mac's terminal, and it may be easier for you to follow along with Mr. Hedinger. That said, it would help to have more information about your problem. Can you post the code you've written to start your Node server?

The fact of the matter is that for developers of any sort, the command line isn't an inconvenient anachronism from 20 years ago, but the best and easiest way to use many of our tools. Just be patient and realize that, no matter how difficult it may seem now, you can do this.

The command line isn't an antiquated throwback that developers use just to confound newbies, but in many cases, especially in web development, it gets the functionality out there for people to use. The only alternative is to have GUIs for everything, and that's a ton more work to make, and in many cases it wouldn't make sense anyway. Sure, you wouldn't want to format a Word document from the command line, you'd use the GUI application, but things like installing packages for your web app just makes sense to do a one-line command like npm install whatever than building a big GUI that you'd still have to learn.

I do feel your pain when it comes to Windows and this stuff, it throws its own hurdles in there. That said, I used Git Bash almost exclusively and found it much easier to follow along with than switching to DOS commands. There's just more web dev professionals using Mac or Linux, so most tutorials and instructions are written for that first, with Windows coming later, if at all, so I was often on my own to figure it out. It can be frustrating, but I just had to realize that many, probably the majority of web developers are on non-Windows machines, so if that's what I was going to go with, I'd have more difficulties to overcome.

As gregsmith5 said, since you have an Ubuntu environment, my choice would be to use that if you can.