Module 0
Module 0 - Foundations: The Machine, the Shell, and Git
You will be able to drive a Linux machine from the command line and keep your work under version control.
A computer running your program is doing a small number of concrete things: loading instructions into memory, tracking them as a process, reading and writing bytes on disk, and passing text between programs through streams. None of that is hidden or magical, and all of it is visible from a terminal if you know which command to type.
This is the layer under every piece of machine learning work you will ever do. You will navigate to a dataset by path, redirect a training log to a file, check whether a process that has been running for six hours is still alive, set an environment variable a library reads, start a local server to view a result, and commit an experiment so you can return to it after the next one fails. None of that is Python, and all of it happens every day.
Without it, every later error is unreadable. A path that does not resolve, a script that writes to the wrong directory, a package that installs into the wrong environment, an experiment whose working version was overwritten and never committed. Those are not machine learning problems, they are machine problems, and they will consume your time in every module after this one until you can see them.
What you will build
No project. Module 0 has no capstone, so what you build here is the two labs and the assignment in each of its eleven lessons, every one of them a real terminal session, and by the end of Section 3, a real repository. The first capstone in the bootcamp is Module 1's.
The sections
- The Machine and Where Things Live - 4 lessons. Processes, memory versus storage, the filesystem tree, and the one rule that turns a path plus your location into a spot on disk.
- The Shell - 3 lessons. Commands, the environment and
PATH, the three streams, redirection and its ordering trap, pipes, and hosts, ports and local servers. - Version Control with Git - 4 lessons. Repositories, reading history, branching and merging, and collaborating with remotes.
Prerequisites
None. This is the first module and it assumes nothing.
What comes at the end
Nothing to sit and nothing to buy. Module 0 has no exam, no capstone and no certificate. It ends when Lesson 0.3.4 does, and the first exam in the product is Module 1's. What you carry out of it is the ability to operate a Unix-style command line without guessing, predict what a command will output before running it, and recover a repository from a state you did not intend. Module 1 builds on the first two from its first day.
Set up your machine first
Lesson 0.1.1 runs Python from a terminal, so before it starts you need a Unix terminal (WSL on Windows), uv, Python 3.12.8 inside a virtual environment at ~/dev/bootcamp, and VS Code opened on that folder. The setup page walks through all four in order, takes about thirty minutes, and ends with a checklist that must pass line for line. If your prompt does not show (bootcamp) or python3 --version does not print 3.12.8, do it before you start Lesson 0.1.1.