Essential JavaScript Shell Scripting Training Course

Discover how Node.js enables cross-platform JavaScript shell scripting, reuse via npm packages, and action-oriented pipelines with libraries like shelljs, covering templates, XML, image processing, data tasks, packaging, and testing.

Explore bash basics and shell scripting concepts on macOS, using the terminal to process csv data with awk, calculating averages, and automating tasks from the command line.

Explore Windows shell scripting with cmd and PowerShell, comparing commands like cd, dir, type and import-csv, and leveraging PowerShell's object oriented pipeline to compute averages and cross‑platform scripting with JavaScript.

Explore how Node.js lets you run JavaScript on the command line, reuse code via the Node package manager, and import modules to build modular shell scripts with a CSV parser.

Install node.js on mac from nodejs.org, verify with node -v, and review the history from io.js to v4 and v5, including long-term and short-term releases.

Install Node.js on Windows using the MSI, verify with node -v and npm, manage versions with nvm, and choose editors such as Sublime Text or WebStorm.

Create blog post file names with the current date and time using the bash date command, then use Node.js REPL to format dates with an npm package for cross-OS consistency.

Format dates in Node.js using moment.js by installing the package via npm, requiring it in a script, and using moment().format to display dates in a desired format.

Explore how JavaScript and Node.js provide an object oriented shell. Interact with objects that have properties and methods, using moment for date manipulation.

Learn how to access environment variables, including the username, using Node.js global objects like process, and explore the Node.js API to understand globals such as console and require.

Capture the username from the process environment and create a date variable, then log a formatted blog header with an ES6 template string in Node.js.

Write files in Node.js shell scripts using the fs module with synchronous methods, creating a dated markdown file with a header and existsSync checks to avoid overwriting.

Explore how stdout and stderr operate as two separate streams, differentiate logs from warnings with console.log and console.warn, and redirect outputs to files via pipes and file descriptors.

Understand exit codes as indicators of script status, using non-zero values to flag problems and zero to indicate success, including standard error and the process exit function in bash.

Explore how to clean and pretty print XML data using JavaScript libraries, compare command line tools with code, and access the My Pyramid Food Raw Data using path operations.

Explore how to use the path module in node to build reliable file paths, join directories with path.join, and handle home directory tilde references, while validating files with fs.existsSync.

Learn to use tilde expansion in paths with the expand-tilde package, and compare it to using the path module and home environment variables for cross-platform reliability.

Learn to read an XML file in Node.js using the synchronous file system API, specify encoding to avoid raw buffers, and print the contents to the console.

Learn to pipe the output of a node script to commands like cat and less, enabling scrolling and mixing JavaScript with Bash or PowerShell in shell scripts.

Learn how to pretty print XML using the pretty-data npm package, pipe to less, and save the formatted output to Pretty.xml.

Review the chapter wrap-up and locate the final blog post and pretty xml in the working files. Explore Shell JS and try a JavaScript word-count command on a file.

Import the shell js global module, build an images array by listing a directory, and echo the results. Filter to jpeg files with a wildcard to mirror ls behavior.

Learn to convert images into 200x200 thumbnails using the lwip library in Node.js, applying contain transformation with white padding, and manage input/output paths with path and base name utilities.

Explore shell js shortcuts like exit, cat, to, and env for concise file reading, writing, and environment access in JavaScript shell scripts, prompt for user input with read line sync.

Discover portability of shell scripts across macOS and Windows, using npm init, package.json, and npm install to replicate environments, and resolve Windows issues with Python 2.7 and Visual Studio 2015.

learn to enhance a Node.js thumbnail script by adding command line arguments with Commander, including directory and size options, defaults, and automatic help for robust CLI usage.

Install the commander package, save it in package.json, set the program version to 1.0, and define two required arguments: size (integer) and directory (path) parsed with commander in any order.

discover how to use commander to parse arguments, produce automatic help and version output, enforce required options with defaults, and modularize option parsing in Node.js shell scripting.

Learn to parse a CSV with JavaScript shell scripts using shelljs and a CSV parser, then manipulate collections with low dash to slice headers and compute the closing price average.

Compute the average closing price using LOE dash's sum function in a functional data pipeline that maps, parses, and aggregates csv data.

Explore separation of concerns in JavaScript data pipelines, transforming data rows into a closing prices array, converting strings to numbers, and sorting by value with low dash.

Group prices by week using a group by function, then map to compute the average closing price per week with moment and lodash in a JavaScript pipeline.

Learn to create and install a global npm package that exposes shell scripts as executables, configure bin mappings, and run commands from anywhere using node and npm.

Understand how global packages work, including npm global installs and symlinks to commands like pretty XML and thumbs, and why a shebang matters on Mac and Windows.

Learn how to test shell scripts using mocha in the JavaScript ecosystem, writing automated tests for a weekly average function, configuring dev dependencies, and running npm test.

Learn how to test weekly averages in JavaScript shell scripting by extracting the compute weekly averages function into a module, exporting it, and wiring tests with rows, moment, and assertions.

Write tests to validate a shell script that computes weekly averages from data rows, asserts expected dates and floating point averages, and ensures proper order via deep equality.

Explore Node.js documentation and modules for shell scripting, including process APIs, child processes, and asynchronous execution, plus streams, promises, and async/await with Babel.