Ubuntu Terminal capabilities

Greetings CEians,
So, I am currently involved in building a prototype security system for houses using Linux Ubuntu. Therefore, if anybody is familiar with Ubuntu are welcomed to provide me some basic ideas or links that can help me understand Ubuntu and its Terminal's capabilities because I don't major in this field. Your replies and comments are highly appreciated.

The first and foremost question is, can the terminal control an application or software to do a certain thing?

The uBuntu manual pages should be a good start. I'm not entirely clear about the use of 'terminal'. Maybe you could just use it to run a script to control hardware or software of your choice.

The terminal is just like command prompt in windows, which executes shell commands and system commands.. 😀