CSC 271
Software I

Utilities and Internals
Instructor: Dr. Stephen Bloch
Fall, 2011

Parts of this page are copied from the last time I taught the course; many of the links don't work yet, but they will Real Soon Now!

Syllabus	Calendar	Assignments	Moodle	Examples

This course meets from 10:50 AM to 12:05 PM, Tuesdays and Thursdays, in Science 227.

I've ordered several textbooks for this course, but they're all "recommended" rather than required; we'll also use a lot of online documentation and some handouts.

• Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming, published by Addison-Wesley
• Robbins, Unix in a Nutshell, published by O'Reilly
• Mark Allen Weiss, C++ for Java Programmers, published by Pearson Prentice Hall (I'm told this book is available for rent at about half of its purchase price; talk to the bookstore.)
• Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language, published by Addison-Wesley

My office hours are MTWTh 3:00-4:00 and W 9:25-12:00.

I taught this course in Fall 1994, Fall 1995, Fall 1996, Fall 1997, Fall 2005, and Fall 2007 as well, and some information and handouts are still available from those classes.

Reading assignments

In addition to the several textbooks I ordered through the bookstore, I recommend the video "Triumph of the Nerds", a documentary about the history of the microcomputer industry, available in the Adelphi library, and its companion web site. The documentary is fifteen years old, so some of the people interviewed in this documentary have died since then; it's still interesting stuff. The documentary's creator still blogs about the IT business at cringely.com.

And here are some on-line readings:

• Cay Horstmann's tips on C++ for Java Programmers
• The University of Wisconsin's on-line tutorial on C++ for Java Programmers
• My collection of adages on software engineering
• An article on How to Become a Hacker
• How Not to Program in C++ (book free on-line if you're an ACM member)

On-line documentation for Unix commands

• UNIXhelp for Users (within which I particularly direct your attention to the section on shell scripts)
• man mkdir, man rmdir, man pwd
• man mv, man cp, man touch, man rm
• man ls, man du
• man tcsh (sections on file completion, history substitution, aliases, variables, command substitution, wild cards, and globbing)
• man file, man find
• man tcsh (sections on jobs, fg, bg), man ps, man kill
• man tcsh (section on umask), man chmod
• man ln
• man tcsh (sections on pushd and popd)
• info info, read that page, then hit "h" for an interactive tutorial on the "info" program. You can then use info to learn about other programs.

On-line documentation for programming tools

• info gdb (No, I don't expect you to read it all, but get started on it.)
• man flex
• info make

On-line documentation for C library functions

C high-level I/O

• man stdio, which leads to...
• man fopen (including freopen)
• man fclose
• man fprintf (including printf, sprintf)
• man fscanf (including scanf, sscanf)
• man feof
• man putc (including putchar, fputs, etc.)
• man getc (including getchar, fgets, etc.)
• man perror

C string and environment manipulation

• man getenv
• system
• man strlen
• man strcat (including strcat, strcpy, strdup, strcasecmp)
• man strspn (including strcspn)
• man strchr (including strrchr, index, rindex)
• man strtok

Low-level Unix system calls

• man open
• man creat
• man read
• man write
• man exec
• man pipe
• man fork
• man socket, man bind, man listen, man accept, man connect