getting started

Let me remind you of basic expectations - please read the "copyright & plagiarism" stuff on the resources page.

As usual, we'll have weekly assignments, and you'll get a single term letter grade based on the number of those turned in with a reasonable effort. We'll have a couple other graded assignments, mostly labs from the CMU course.

I think I have set up accounts on shannon.marlboro.college and put most of you into this course website. Let me know if not.

Questions about anything?

We're just going to jump in with the general "working with C and unix" background stuff. If these topics aren't familiar, start googling and look around for tutorials. I've listed some on the resources page. If they are familiar, remind yourself of the details.

command line

We'll be working at the unix command prompt, like this.

laptop$ ssh user@shannon.marlboro.college      # connect to a remote server
shannon$ pwd                                   # print working directory name
/home/user
shannon$ ls                                    # list files

some commands: pwd, ls, cd, tree, head, tail, more (less), echo, printenv, tail, w, top, nano, vim, emacs -nw, gcc, which, make, chmod

some folders: /, ~, ., ..

Other topics for discussion:

• invisible files
• environment variables
• startup files
• permissions
• shell scripts
• path

Questions?

C

Go over C syntax, pointers, and all that. Here are some examples to prompt our discussion.

• Jim's gcc notes
• Jim's word list examples
• textbook's show_bytes.c

Topics to explore:

• bytes, bits, bit operations
• C strings
• booleans ("what is truth?")
• types and type declarations
• declaration vs initialization vs assignment
• pointers
• arrays
• structs
• variables on the stack vs variables on the heap
• malloc
• header (.h) files
• preprocess vs compile vs link
• compiling & linking C programs with multiple files

Questions?