“building a strong foundation in the command line”
i started with IBM JCL and punched cards and assembler language ... then decades with programming FORTRAN and C and the unix command line ... modern interpreted languages and GUI operating systems turned drudgery to joy ... F**k the command line!
I'd been doing remote support (via telnet & ftp) in HP-UX, AIX and Xenix for two years before I discovered UNIX even had a GUI.