Now at first sight,
completely not related to what we just talked about,
is the topic of Human Computer Interaction.
Now, what's going on now?
If you're working on a computer,
you interact with that computer, right?
You click here and there, you create folders,
you open applications, and so on.
Now, if you think a bit more about this, well, process,
about this interaction,
then it's a bit more complicated
than what it seems at first sight.
Let's think about this in a very easy way.
You, as the human being are here,
and your computer, the machine, is there.
Now, you work with this computer
and you want this computer to do something.
So, you think, or you say, well,
open the applications folder for example,
here on the MacBook.
Well, then you do this probably
by navigating to the applications folder
and by double-clicking it.
But, the logic that this navigation for the folder structure
and this double-click and so on works,
but this is actually due to, well, the way
Human Computer Interaction is designed by developers.
Because by default, well, talking to the computer, well,
would result in nothing.
We need to have kind of an interaction, an interface,
that makes sure that we as human beings
and the computer, as a machine, well,
can interact with each other.
This can be done in two different ways.
It can be done via a so-called GUI
or a CLI.
Now, what are these, now?
GUI
stands for Graphical User Interface.
Whereas, CLI
stands for Command Line Interface.
This doesn't help a lot, I guess.
But, if we look at an example GUI, well,
you might feel quite familiar with it, right?
This is the finder here on my Mac computer,
which would be the equivalent to the Windows Explorer,
in case you're working on a Windows machine at the moment.
Both of these, well, interfaces,
so to say, are Graphical User Interfaces.
So, these are in the end, interfaces made by developers
to make sure you as human being,
can easily access your machine, the different folders,
the different programs and so on.
Now, turns out that this GUI was just created to make this
interaction between humans and machines as easy as possible.
Because if you don't want to become a web developer,
or if you're not that into computers at all, well,
then this is actually a very convenient way
to interact with a computer.
We could actually also use a CLI, though.
A CLI would look like this.
This is the same folder structure displayed, now there.
In contrast to the GUI, our finder here,
this CLI is the so-called Terminal on the Mac
or the Command Prompt,
which will be the equivalent on the Windows machine.
This is command-based computer interaction.
Meaning, I just navigated into this folder
by typing certain commands.
I didn't use a mouse.
I didn't use any kind of click or double-click.
I just navigated by a pure command input.
And the question now is why am I telling you this?
Why is this important for this module?
Well, because, turns out that the fastest
and most common way to efficiently work with Git and GitHub,
is the Command Line Interface.
There are options to use a Graphical User Interface
when working with these tools,
but once you're familiar with the CLI-based, well,
computer interaction with Git and GitHub,
this is the preferred approach of most developers
and also the approach we will teach you in this module.
So, this is the reason
why we need to understand the CLI approach here.
And specifically, if you're using a Mac computer,
we will use the Terminal there, the so-called z Shell.
Which is basically
the software running the Terminal so to say.
The Terminal is the Command Line Interface of Mac computers.
And for Windows users,
we will work with the Command Prompt, the CMD.
An alternative would be the so-called PowerShell.
This is a newer version to interact
from the command line with Windows computers.
We'll focus onto the Command Prompt though,
as it is the more established
and also still more common way
to interact with Windows machines via the Command Line.
So, the takeaway here is if this is not new to you,
then you can skip the next two lectures.
If you never heard of these concepts,
or if you're not familiar with these,
then if you're a Mac user,
please continue with the next lecture.
If you're a Windows user,
then please skip the next lecture
and continue with the following lecture.
Where we will dive into the Command Prompt basics.
Therefore, for any Mac user
who wants to find out more about the Terminal,
see you in the next lecture.
There we'll dive into the basics
of the Terminal, specifically of the z Shell.