"from experience mastering (comfortably) a trade usually takes 10 years."
Maybe, but you don't have to be a master bash script programmer to write some
very effective scripts, or even to be a system administrator! Mastery is
necessary if you are doing very complex things. Think of carpentry. You can
make some very nice looking and functional furniture without being a master
carpenter. Want to make something complex, with inlays and carvings, then
you need to be a master or artisan.
The basic principles of programming are the same in any language. One
interesting thing about bash programming, is that you can write a script to
run commands in the shell; Commands you could otherwise type in directly in a
terminal. Here is a trivial example:
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/You
ls
You need to know some things about the command line, like the need to make a
file executable with: chmod +x filename
And how to execute the file: ./filename
There is an opportunity to learn more even with this simple example. Compare
its output to the output you get by directly typing these commands in a
terminal. Why is the listing not color when you run the script, but is in
color when you run it directly in the terminal?
Bash scripting is a natural extension of using the command line (otherwise
program in lisp or C or Java or Python or Perl or Ruby, etc...etc...). So
the first thing is to learn as much as you can about the command-line and get
practice by using it often.
