What you should know before starting this course

- In this course, I expect that you're at least somewhat familiar with working at the command line on Linux or Mac OS X. SSH will get you to the command prompt on a remote system so you need to know what to do when you get there. If you're not familiar with the command line, I suggest that you take a look at the first eight chapters of Unix for Mac OS X Users here on Lynda.com. Those chapters provide a great introduction to using the bash environment, which is very common.

Throughout this course, I'll be using a remote server running on a virtual machine, in this case a DigitalOcean droplet. And I've set its host name to "orion.dev" in my local hosts file so I don't have to type the IP address every time. You'll need your own server. Some Web Hosts offer SSH access or you can use an existing server, or set up a Virtual Machine locally or online somewhere, like DigitalOcean so you can poke around. If you need to set up a local Virtual Machine with Linux, you can follow along with my Up and Running with Ubuntu Desktop Linux or Up and Running with CentOS Linux courses to get going.