A great deal of modern application development evolves around visible bits and pieces. Whether we are talking about the server infrastructure, development tools, or the resulting application itself, graphical interfaces dominate our experience nowadays. While the diversity and overall list of available GUI tools seems endless, the console still remains an important part of development that any self-respectful developer should be familiar with.
There are countless reasons why the console is simply the right tool for the job. Take large database backups, for example. Trying to backup gigabytes of MySQL data via the GUI tool is likely to result in a complete failure or a corrupt backup file, whereas the console-based mysqldump tool is impervious to the size of the backup or the time it takes for it to execute. Things such as large and time-consuming data...