I don’t always make the time to pre-read the shownotes for Programming By Stealth but I never regret when I do make the time. That was especially true this week. In this installment, Bart Busschots takes us through his solution to the challenge from PBS 151, which was to print a “pretty” multiplication table using the printf command.
Being Bart, he didn’t just make the columns line up nicely, he took it up a notch and added ASCII characters that build a nice border and corners around his table.
The reason I said it was good I pre-read the shownotes is that while nearly everything he explains in this lesson was a reuse of things he’s taught us before, the commands are so dense in Bash that it was particularly hard to read and comprehend. We had also taken 4 weeks between lessons which made it even harder to remember.
Because I told Bart ahead of time that I was going to be stopping him to ask lots of questions, we decided to skip the one main topic he had planned to explain – xargs. This means that the next installment will start with xargs as Programming By Stealth 152B using the same shownotes. I’m really glad we did it this way because instead of you having to listen to a confused and thus frustrated Allison, the lesson flows well with me having time to ask the right questions.
You can find Bart’s fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.
Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_06_24
Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It’s by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!