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:

1. wanting to know how and why computers work

2. being efficient / never repeating yourself

3. using and contributing to open source software

4. understanding the edge cases of your software

5. using tools in creative and unexpected ways

6. (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:

1. 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.

2. 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	Tuesday 11-noon
teaching assistant	Busra Celikkaya	Friday 2pm-3pm
teaching assistant	Zachary Benavides	Friday 1pm-2pm

IMPORTANT: If you want to contact the instructors about the course, you should NOT do it via email. Instead, 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/quiz	topics
1	Jan05		introduction; using vim
1	Jan07	Daniel Lemire's how to learn efficiently; Paul Graham's what to do in college; and Ian Malpass's advice to future software engineers	version control with git
2	Jan12	esr's all about unix and about common software licenses	version control with git
2	Jan14	quiz; the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	syscalls: managing processes (fork,wait,exec,perror)
3	Jan19	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 files (open,close,read,write)
3	Jan21	Kenley Arai's tutorial on test driven development; Gabriel Ruiz's tutorial on how to design test cases;	debugging tools (gdb)
4	Jan26	William Coates' valgrind tutorial; Paul Graham's how to be a good hacker; Jeff Atwood's how to become a better programmer	debugging tools (valgrind,cppcheck)
4	Jan28	quiz; bitwise operators; macros; the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	syscalls: managing directories (readdir,stat)
5	Feb02	Ycombinator's startup ideas we'd like to fund and Paul Graham's start up funding	shell scripting: io redirection/piping
5	Feb04	Patrick McKenzie on salary negotiation for programmers (it's long; you don't have to read it all)	shell scripting: io redirection/piping
6	Feb09	the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	syscalls: io redirection/piping (pipe,dup)
6	Feb11	quiz	shell scripting: control flow with if and for
7	Feb16	esr's thoughts on using make	shell scripting: detailed makefiles
7	Feb18	Shubhro Saha's why engineers should write; the economist's good writing style	syscalls: signal handling (signal,sigaction)
8	Feb23	the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	shell scripting: environment variables (export,PATH,HOME,EDITOR)
8	Feb25	quiz	syscalls: environment variables (getenv,setenv)
9	Mar02	esr's classic Master Foo series	syscalls: pthreads
9	Mar04	esr's thoughts on flaws with unix; Poul-Henning Kamp's a generation lost in the bazaar	syscalls: sockets
10	Mar09	quiz	case study: hacking the email system and the ioccc.org
10	Mar11	---	case study: stuxnet and heartbleed

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 of week 3 (Jan 23rd) @ 11:59 PM
hw1	Sunday of week 6 (Feb 8th) @ 11:59 PM
hw4 - topic	Wednesday of week 6 (Feb 11th) before class
hw2	Sunday of week 8 (Feb 22th) @ 11:59 PM
hw4 - draft	Wednesday of week 8 (Feb 25th) before class
hw3	Sunday of week 10 (Mar 8th) @ 11:59 PM
hw4 - final	Friday of week 10 (Mar 13th) @ 11:59 PM

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.