Organizing Your Work for this Course

Learning Goals

Configure a directory for storing lessons
Understand the relationship between navigating directories in the terminal and navigating directories in a graphical user interface like Finder
Practice common terminal commands such as pwd, ls, mkdir, and cd

Instructions

From now on, you'll be executing code on your own computer. For each and every lab, you'll be copying the code to your computer using Git. You will then be able to run and test your code in your terminal and submit your work to Canvas using a tool called CodeGrade. You will learn how to do all of this in the next lesson. First, however, you need to get your local directory structure set up and learn how to navigate around in it.

MacOS: Setting Up Your Directory Structure

For Mac users, follow along with this video:

WSL: Setting Up Your Directory Structure

For Windows users, follow along with this video:

Creating Folders to Organize Your Work

Go to your terminal and navigate to your home directory by typing cd ~.
Navigate into the Development folder with cd Development (if you don't have a Development folder yet, you can create it with mkdir Development, then cd into it).
Create a directory for all your assignments by typing mkdir code.
Navigate into this folder with cd code.
In here, create a directory for Software Engineering Prep with mkdir se-prep.

You'll be going through multiple phases in this course, so it may be helpful to go one step further and also create folders for phases 1 through 5 within code. When making the phase folders use a - between words. For example, the phase 1 folder should be named phase-1.

Having a specific place for your work will make it easier to find if you ever need to look back at an earlier project. It'll also keep the rest of your computer's folders clear of random code.

Terminal Command Reference

Here's a quick reference of the terminal commands used in these videos. For more, check out this awesome cheatsheet.

Command	Description
ls	List all files and folders in the current directory
ls -a	List all files and folders, including hidden files
mkdir [name]	Make a new directory with the given [name]
cd [folder]	Change directories to the given [folder]
cd ..	Change directories to the parent directory
cd ~	Change directories to the home directory
pwd	Print the full path of the current working directory
explorer.exe	(Windows) Open the File Explorer to the current directory
open .	(Mac) Open the Finder application to the current directory

Resources

Terminal Commands Cheatsheet

learn-co-curriculum/phase-0-organizing-work-on-your-computer