CSC 209 course outline

Course information (September 12)

• Course information sheet in HTML or PDF. (Includes office hours and similar information.)
• E-mail is the best way to reach me and to ask questions.
• There is a document about textbooks.
• Photo id student cards will be required during the midterm and the exam.
• Assignment schedule, on-time expectations.
• Bulletin board
• You should read or at least skim A Student's Guide to CDF at http://www.cdf.toronto.edu/ssi.pages/general_student_guide.pdf (PDF).
• Some notes by me about using CDF from home (not mentioned in class, but may be of use)

Software tools (weeks of September 12, September 19)

• some notes
• (this is not in the Haviland et al book; we'll use Haviland for some future topics... after we do some C...)

Shell programming (the rest of September)

• see "man sh"
  • in linux, try to ignore the GNU extensions...
• notes and examples

The unix filesystem (week of October 4 -- might begin Sept 29)

• Haviland et al chapters 1 and 4, and bits of chapter 3.
• Ritchie and Thompson, The UNIX Time-Sharing System, CACM 17 (1974) / BSTJ 57 (1978). Especially sections 3 and 4.
• some notes

The C programming language (approximately October)

• introductory notes

  References in King:

  • Most of chapter 2 except 2.5 (see scanf below) and 2.6 (I'll do #define in with the rest of the C preprocessor stuff in a few weeks, but you can read section 2.6 easily enough for understanding the rest of the examples in King)
  • You already know chapters 4, 5, and 6 from Java, and sort of chapter 9

  Then:

• C data types; pointers and arrays

  References in King:

  • more of chapter 7
  • chapters 11 and 12
  • chapter 8.1 to the extent you don't already know it
  • (multidimensional arrays aren't anything new in C, given that you know them in Java; how they work with pointers is kinda new, but not extremely, and I don't think I'm going to go into that in this course, although you're quite welcome to ask in office hours or by e-mail if you have any questions about that)

• C: printf and scanf (probably doing scanf after strings; just basic printf at first here)

• C command-line arguments (argc and argv)

• then files in C (chapter 22), C strings (chapter 13), C pre-processor (chapter 14), and more C data types including structs (chapter 16.1 through 16.3).
• Dynamic memory allocation (malloc), discussed in the above-cited structs.html; see King chapter 17.
• Typedef (King 7.6).

Mid-term test (October 24)

Processes (October 27; November 1, 3)

• Topics covered in lecture and links to examples developed in lecture
• See Haviland et al 5.1 - 5.4 and 5.10
• My above notes include I/O redirection and pipes in C (Haviland 5.5 and 7.1).
• Signals (Haviland chapter 6, except we're not going into all that detail).
• You can find some unix man pages at http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi

Mid-term break, November 7 and 8

Inter-process and network communication (November 10, 15, 17)

socket code examples

I think that most socket matters are covered in the Haviland et al book... except for the network newline convention.
(But note that the Haviland et al book has some buggy socket code in that it does not call htonl() and htons() appropriately. On a big-endian machine, this doesn't matter; on a little-endian machine, such as the CDF linux machines, it makes your program not work. See the above examples for proper use of htonl() and htons().)

Present in this course especially to answer the question "what's the difference between unix and linux?"

A number of philosophical documents from the GNU Project can be found at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html. For an introduction, see "Why Software Should Not Have Owners".

The "free software" movement is something I'm quite interested in and happy to discuss outside of class time (e.g. in office hours) with those who are interested.

Multitasking implementation and memory layout and such, as time permits (November 24)

Computer security (November 29, December 1)

• If you are interested in this topic, then among other things you may want to read the classic (despite being only about fifteen years old) paper by Farmer and Venema entitled "Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into it", and perhaps the even-more-classic "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson (one of the primary inventors of unix) (paper from 1984). (In the Ken Thompson paper, the "figure 1" is very hard to read, and besides, perhaps you want to try it out. Here is that program. Not quite up to modern C standards -- gcc -Wall complains a bunch -- but it still works.)

POSIX threads (December 6)

Concluding notes (December 6)

Regarding unnecessarily complex computer programs:
"The superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations in which he has to demonstrate his superior skill." (traditional airplane pilot saying)

RFC 1958, Architectural Principles of the Internet, contains a wonderful sentence:
"If there are several ways of doing the same thing, choose one."