Several loose statements at the beginning of this lecture

First off, Umair, thank you for your feedback. Of course, I’m happiest when people are learning smoothly from what I make, but how can I improve things that don’t work as well if no one lets me know, right?

To your first point, when I said, “But it’s more than just gcloud, really, because gsutil and bq are very much related.” I think it would have been clearer if I had instead said, “But this lecture applies to more than just gcloud, really, because gsutil and bq are very much related to it.”

And I’m sorry that my “best friends” reference didn’t register for you. I was hoping that students might come away from this whole slide (not just that statement) with a sense that those three command-line tools–gcloud, gsutil, and bq–are all related in the following ways:

1) They all share the same core configuration, set via gcloud, and

2) They all use a similar calling structure and flags.

Calling them “best friends” is just a mnemonic that some people might find helpful, but it’s ok if you don’t use it for yourself. Some people might imagine three school kids all dressed alike (“sharing the same configuration”) and playing the same games (“similar structure”). But this is just one idea and you should use whatever works best for you, to help you remember.

When I said, “Almost as if you could have called”, I meant that “storage” and “bigquery” aren’t actually valid service/product terms that you can pass to gcloud, but if they were valid, they would pretty much work exactly like gsutil and bq work, now–configuration, calling structure, functionality, etc. In this case, this is a little bit of a forward reference to the next slide, but I’m saying it in advance so that the way you interpret the next slide (and therefore the mental model you build) is broader and includes gsutil and bq.

As a general rule, you will need to do more than just watch the videos to learn the material–and that will definitely include reading some key documentation. But I think maybe I pushed the gcloud reading material a bit too hard, in this lecture. When I wrote and recorded this lecture, I was remembering how much gcloud I saw on my exam–but given that I summarize and demonstrate so much of it (in this lecture and through all the labs), it would probably be fine to just review the documentation before your exam, as a refresher. Well, that’s assuming everything is “sticking” for you, though–if someone is struggling to make sense of the command lines we use because that’s newer to them, they should dig into the reference material right away, so they can be building a strong mental model as they go.

Does all of this clarify what I meant and help you better understand these tools? If you and others think this is valuable, I’ll see about trying to work it into the lecture for everybody. So please let me know if this is helpful or if it’s still not–both Umair and anyone else reading this, I mean.

Thanks!

Mattias