I wholeheartedly agree that it's a good investment to spend time learning your way around the shell. And I've been quite successfully proselytizing it at home: the terminal and the UNIX toolset has been part of my sons' introduction to computing. I actually wrote it down in form of a (free, online) book. It began with my sons in mind, but it soon became a more serious endeavor:

http://juanreyero.com/hacker-ways/index.html

HN is not the target audience, but it might be helpful for somebody.