cs100 - open source software construction
This is a course on how to be a hacker. Being a hacker means a lot of things. It means:
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wanting to know how and why computers work
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being efficient / never repeating yourself
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using and contributing to open source software
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understanding the edge cases of your software
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using tools in creative and unexpected ways
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(occasionally) we combine all these together and break stuff
Hacking is a mindset.
I can't force it on you---it's up to you to embrace it.
For example, we'll be discussing many new tools in this course:
a version control system called git,
an editor called vim,
debugging tools called gdb, valgrind, and cppcheck,
and we'll be going into quite a bit more depth on how to use the bash shell and the Linux operating system.
All of these tools are very weird.
Using them will make you uncomfortable.
At first.
But these tools are powerful.
Mastering these tools will make you a much more efficient programmer.
Once you've mastered them, you'll never go back.
There are two main projects you will work on in this course:
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Your first four homework assignments walk you through the process of building your own unix shell. This is the biggest project you've undertaken so far. You'll be developing it as an open source project, and you will collaborate with each other at various points.
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Your last homework assignment is to contribute to the open source community by improving the documentation on a project of your choice. Many of the required readings for this course were written by former cs100 students. If you do a good job on this project, future cs 100 students will be learning from you for years to come!
By the end of the course, you should be comfortable running your own open source projects and contributing to other people's projects.
instructors
| position | name | office hours (WCH 110) |
|---|---|---|
| lecturer | Mike Izbicki | Tuesdays, 11AM |
| teaching assistant | Busra Celikkaya | TBD |
IMPORTANT: If you want to contact the instructors about the course, you should report an issue via github. We will talk about how to do this in class. This is a system similar to the piazza system you may already be familiar with, but it is more popular for open source software development.
course schedules
Our lectures will roughly follow this schedule. You should do the required readings before class. I will occasionally have unscheduled quizzes to ensure you are doing the reading.
| week | date | reading | topics |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mar30 | Daniel Lemire's how to learn efficiently (recommended; not required) | introduction; using vim |
| 1 | Apr01 | ESR's all about unix | version control with git |
| 1 | Apr03 | ERS's about common software licenses; the New Yorker's 30 year retrospective on the GNU manifesto | version control with git |
| 2 | Apr06 | Paul Graham's what to do in college | version control with git |
| 2 | Apr08 | Ian Malpass's advice to future software engineers; Linus Tolvalds gets interviewed on why he developed git | version control with git |
| 2 | Apr10 | Lucas Xu's Makefile tutorial; Alexander Ortiz's how to write a README file; ESR's thoughts on unix documentation part I and part II | syscalls: managing processes (fork,wait,exec,perror); quiz |
| 3 | Apr13 | the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial | syscalls: managing processes (fork,wait,exec,perror) |
| 3 | Apr15 | bitwise operators; macros | syscalls: managing files (open,close,read,write) |
| 3 | Apr17 | the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial | syscalls: managing files (open,close,read,write) |
| 4 | Apr20 | William Coates' valgrind tutorial; | debugging tools (gdb,valgrind,cppcheck) |
| 4 | Apr22 | Jeff Atwood's how to become a better programmer | debugging tools (gdb,valgrind,cppcheck) |
| 4 | Apr24 | the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial | syscalls: managing directories (readdir,stat);quiz |
| 5 | Apr27 | Ycombinator's startup ideas we'd like to fund and Paul Graham's start up funding | shell scripting: io redirection/piping |
| 5 | Apr29 | Patrick McKenzie on salary negotiation for programmers (it's long; you don't have to read it all) | shell scripting: io redirection/piping |
| 5 | May01 | Shubhro Saha's why engineers should write; the economist's good writing style | writing good documentation |
| 6 | May04 | syscalls: io redirection/piping (pipe,dup) |
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| 6 | May06 | the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial | syscalls: io redirection/piping (pipe,dup) |
| 6 | May08 | ESR's classic Master Foo series | shell scripting: control flow with if and for; quiz |
| 7 | May11 | shell scripting: environment variables (export,PATH,HOME,EDITOR) |
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| 7 | May13 | shell scripting: environment variables (export,PATH,HOME,EDITOR) |
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| 7 | May15 | syscalls: signal handling (signal,sigaction) |
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| 8 | May18 | syscalls: signal handling (signal,sigaction) |
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| 8 | May20 | the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial | shell scripting: environment variables (export,PATH,HOME,EDITOR) |
| 8 | May22 | syscalls: environment variables (getenv,setenv); quiz |
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| 9 | May25 | ||
| 9 | May27 | ||
| 9 | May29 | ESR's thoughts on flaws with unix; Poul-Henning Kamp's a generation lost in the bazaar | the flaws of Unix and open source |
| 10 | Jun01 | case study: hacking the email system and the ioccc.org | |
| 10 | Jun03 | case study: stuxnet and heartbleed | |
| 10 | Jun05 | final quiz |
If there's something you want to learn not on the schedule, let me know! We have a lot of flexibility in this course to learn fun things.
The assignments are due on the following days:
| assignment | date |
|---|---|
| hw0 | Friday Apr17 @ 11:59 PM |
| hw1 | Friday May01 @ 11:59 PM |
| hw4 - topic | Wednesday May04 before class |
| hw2 | Friday May17 @ 11:59 PM |
| hw4 - draft | Wednesday May20 before class |
| hw3 | Sunday May29 @ 11:59 PM |
| hw4 - final | Friday Jun05 @ 11:59 PM |
You will receive -10 pts for each hour (rounded up) that your assignment is late.
grades
We will not be using ilearn in this course.
Instead, we will be using a course management system called gitlearn.
This software was developed in part by previous cs100 students,
and you will be able to earn considerable extra credit by contributing to it.
We will be using this system as a case study in bash programming and the unix philosophy.
For details, see the gitlearn repo.
cheating policy
Every assignment specifies different collaboration policies. Some assignments will be individual, and some will be in a group. Follow the specified policy exactly!
I take cheating seriously. When I catch students cheating, I give them an F in the class. Then I forward your case to the academic integrity board and recommend that you be expelled from UCR.
All of your code will be run through an automated cheating detector. It is very good. It understands C++ better than you do and can find instances of cheating much more sophisticated than just copy and pasting.