The Unix Workbench
Johns Hopkins University · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Sean Kross, Jeff Leek, PhD, Brian Caffo, PhD, Roger D. Peng, PhD
Data ScienceComputer Science
About the course
Unix forms a foundation that is often very helpful for accomplishing other goals you might have for you and your computer, whether that goal is running a business, writing a book, curing disease, or creating the next great app. The means to these goals are sometimes carried out by writing software. Software can’t be mined out of the ground, nor can software seeds be planted in spring to harvest by autumn. Software isn’t produced in factories on an assembly line. Software is a hand-made, often be
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (17 votes, 1.0★).
“-Many things about bash are truly unusual compared to other programming languages like python/r/php/etc. When these differences crop up (such as how bash handles (), {}, [], [[ ]], spaces, AND, ||, functional returns, etc) are still somewhat confusing to me after completing the entire course. So maybe I'm a dummy, but I'm guessing MOST people completing this course will only be slightly better off doing bash programming vs. doing nothing at all.”
Coursera's 4.7 comes from 1,369 ratings. Of those, 1.9% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗