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This 1-credit seminar is designed to teach the essentials of using a computer effectively for EECS students. While the target audience is CS/CE/DS students, any student wishing to learn how to use their computer much more effectively is encouraged to join. Topics covered include shells, environment, scripting, Makefiles, compilers, debugging tools, and version control. The end of the course will be open to student input for interesting topics to cover.

Updates

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Course Pre-Requisites

The only enforced pre-requisite for this course is ENGN 101/151 or EECS 182/183, however it is strongly advised that students have either taken or are concurrently enrolled in EECS 280.

It is expected that students are currently enrolled in at least one course involving non-trivial software projects (e.g. EECS 280 or 281). If you are not enrolled in a programming course this term, you must have previously taken a programming course where you still have access to the projects you have completed.

Syllabus & Essential Info

Course Staff

For general issues, e-mail the course staff at c4cs-staff@umich.edu. For sensitive issues, please e-mail Marcus directly.

@marcus-darden Matt Terwilliger Alex Chojnacki Cameron Gagnon Ankit Shah
Marcus Darden Matt Terwilliger Alex Chojnacki Cameron Gagnon Ankit Shah
mmdarden@umich.edu mterwil@umich.edu thealex@umich.edu cgagnon@umich.edu ankshah@umich.edu

Course Resources

Course Q&A / Forum – Piazza

Assignment Submission & Grades – Gradescope

  • Gradescope entry code: MX54N9

To borrow a CSE laptop for the semester, contact Don Winsor at don@umich.edu.

Course Meeting Times and Locations

Section 003 (28920)
1670 BBB, Friday 1:30PM — 3:00PM
Section 004 (28657)
AUD CHRYS, Friday 10:00AM — 11:30AM

In general, you may attend any section, however if the classrooms become overfull, we will have to ask that you attend the section you are officially registered for.

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Schedule

The syllabus is subject to change in response to feedback and class needs throughout the term.
Topic Lecture Materials
Introduction and Basics
Week 1 01/06/2017

Introduction, Virtual Machines, & Command Line Primer

Lecture

  • Lines of text as a universal interface
  • Examples of unix commands and command synthesis

Homework

  • Set up a virtual machine
  • Some light reading

Advanced

  • None this week

Syllabus week! Don’t expect anything too deep here. Just an easy introduction to the C4CS curriculum.

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video


B1G TEN Commands

cat ● cd ● cp ● fg ● help ● jobs ● kill ● ls ● mkdir ● mv ● pwd ● rm ● sleep

mmdarden

Homework 1 [pdf]

Homework 1 [tex]


Solutions 1 [pdf]

Week 2 01/13/2017

Basic Git

Lecture

  • What's version control?
  • Why is it important?
  • Git fundamentals
  • Advanced git highlights
  • Social Coding

Homework

  • Intro tutorial to git
  • Setting up a class project with git
  • Basic usage and configuration

Advanced

  • Rescuing repositories in bad states
  • Commit hooks

During lecture, Darden was using a program called git-bash-prompt. Here’s a link to download and install it if you’re interested. Install via git clone or homebrew (MacOS)

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video


B1G TEN Commands

git

mmdarden

Homework 2 [pdf]

Homework 2 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 2 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 2 [tex]


Solutions 2 [pdf]

Week 3 01/20/2017

Shells, Environment, Scripting, and Bash

Lecture

  • How do programs start
  • Why does environment matter?
  • Scripting versus programming
  • Examples

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video


B1G TEN Commands

chmod ● man ● file ● echo ● seq ● true ● which ● export ● yes ● $_ ● $variable ● history ● grep

mmdarden

Homework 3 [pdf]

Homework 3 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 3 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 3 [tex]


Solutions 3 [pdf]

Being Efficient
Week 4 01/27/2017

Editors

Lecture

  • Is there anything special about text editors?
  • Philosophy of text editors
  • The old editors, and why they're still around
  • The new editors, and what they get right
  • Various tips and tricks in a few different editors

Homework

  • A crash course in Vim and EMACS
  • Working remotely with umich's CAEN

Advanced

  • Working in existing codebases
  • Making it your editor through plugins

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video


B1G TEN Commands

objdump ● stat ● ed ● sed ● vi ● emacs

mmdarden

Homework 4 [pdf]

Homework 4 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 4 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 4 [tex]


Solutions 4 [pdf]

Week 5 02/03/2017

Git II

Lecture

  • Understanding branches
  • Basic merging
  • Expanding the triangle
    • Push, fetch, pull
    • Remote branches and remotes as branches
  • Synchronizing work (+stashing)
  • Commit everything, branch often
  • Cleaning history - Rebasing, squashing

Homework

  • Thinking in git
  • Practice with merging, conflicts

Advanced

  • Using git to collaborate for real

Some tips and tricks to make working with git more enjoyable.

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video

mterwil

Homework 5 [pdf]

Homework 5 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 5 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 5 [tex]


Solutions 5 [pdf]

Week 6 02/10/2017

Unix II

Lecture

  • Lines of text as a universal interface
  • Examples of unix commands and command synthesis

Homework

  • Basics of regular expressions
  • Guided intro to some tools
  • Synthesizing tools into powerful queries

Advanced

  • Shell scripting
  • (Basic) shell job control
  • Automated testing

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video

mmdarden

Homework 6 [pdf]

Homework 6 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 6 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 6 [tex]


Solutions 6 [pdf]

Developing
Week 7 02/17/2017

Build Systems

Lecture

  • Conceptual model for a build system
  • Basic operation of make
    • syntax, goals, targets, rules, varaiables (yours and make's)

Homework

  • Basic operation
  • Understanding goals and targets
  • Built-ins and implicit rules
    • Guided digging into how a tool works

Advanced

  • gcc and make integration
  • Exploring alternative build systems

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video


B1G TEN Commands

echo ● ed ● cat ● emacs ● make ● sed ● touch ● tr

mmdarden

Homework 7 [pdf]

Homework 7 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 7 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 7 [tex]


Solutions 7 [pdf]

Week 8 02/24/2017

OH++ (Optional)

Lecture

  • Bring your questions, anything you've ever wanted to know and we'll figure it out.

Friday Lecture Video

cgagnon

No homework this week!

Week 9 03/03/2017

Spring Break (No lecture)

No homework this week!

Week 10 03/10/2017

Unit Testing and Python

Lecture

  • What's unit testing?
  • Test driven development
  • Python
  • Live coding to learn these

Created an RPN calculator in Python.

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video

mmdarden

Homework 10 [pdf]

Homework 10 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 10 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 10 [tex]


Solutions 10 [pdf]

Week 11 03/17/2017

Debuggers

Lecture

  • What a debugger (the tool) does
  • What a debugger (the tool) doesn't do
  • What a debugger (the person) must do
  • How to reason about a debugging problem
  • Open -- Things that "can't" be debugged?

Homework

  • Building a mental model for debugging
  • Introducing valgrind

Advanced

  • printf debugging
  • Extending gdb

Files for class inf.c math.c

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video

mmdarden

Homework 11 [pdf]

Homework 11 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 11 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 11 [tex]


Solutions 11 [pdf]

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Week 12 03/24/2017

Package Managers & Development Environments

Lecture

  • Installing packages
  • Inspecting package contents
  • Uploading packages
  • The magic of Free Open Source Software

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video

mmdarden

Homework 12 [pdf]

Homework 12 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 12 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 12 [tex]

Week 13 03/31/2017

IDEs

Lecture

  • What is an IDE?
  • How are they useful?
  • IDE toolsets
  • Modifying an IDE
  • IDEs and their use cases

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video

mmdarden

Homework 13 [pdf]

Homework 13 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 13 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 13 [tex]

Week 14 04/07/2017

A Sampling of Other Things

Lecture

  • Profiling
  • Static Analysis
  • Developer Surveys

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

Friday Lecture Video

mmdarden

Homework 14 [pdf]

Homework 14 [tex]

Advanced Exercise 14 [pdf]

Advanced Exercise 14 [tex]


Solutions 14 [pdf]

Week 15a 04/14/2017 (AM)

(VPS + SSH) == fun

Lecture

  • Virtual Private Servers
  • Pluggable Authentication Modules
  • Logging and Securing a VPS

Slides [pdf]

Wednesday Lecture Video

cgagnon

No homework this week!

Week 15b 04/14/2017 (PM)

Artistic selfies with neural nets in the cloud

Lecture

  • Cloud computing
  • Projects for the web
  • You know more than you think

Slides [pdf]

Friday Lecture Video

thealex

No homework this week!

Attendance, Grading, and Homework

This course is graded on a straight scale, it will not be curved. There are a total of 100 possible points in this course. You are expected to earn 40 points from Homework, 30 points from Attendance and Participation, and 30 points from Advanced Exercises, however each section has modest opportunity for extra credit that can cover missing points elsewhere.

Range notation [90,93) means 90 is included and 93 is not

Final Grades

A+
>100
A
[93,100]
A-
[90,93)
B+
[86.7,90)
B
[83.3,86.7)
B-
[80,83.3)
C+
[76.7,80)
C
[73.3,76.7)
C-
[70,73.3)
D+
[66.7,70)
D
[63.3,66.7)
D-
[60,63.3)
F
[0,60)

Homework (40% / 40 points)

There are 12 homework assignments in the course. Each homework assignment is worth 4 points. Any points over 40 points are worth half their value, that is if a student completes all 12 assignments with a perfect score, their total points earned from homework will be 40 + (0.5×8) = 44.

Late assignments will not be accepted. Notice that one can miss/skip up to two assignments and still receive the full 40 homework points.

Homework Effort and Grading

This is a 1 credit course and the homeworks are designed to be commensurate with that. Each assignment should take 60–90 minutes on average. The goal of the homeworks is to reinforce concepts introduced in lecture and to give hands-on experience.

We will give each homework a “raw” grade in Gradescope, which will then convert to a final score using the following conversion:

[0,0.25] → 0 points
No / very little effort
(0.25,2] → 2 points
Some effort, but not quite there
(2,4] → 4 points
Solid effort, completed successfully

The idea here is that homework does not have to 100% perfect to receive full credit. In addition, course staff can be a little “nit-picky”, taking off tenths of points to draw your attention to corrections and suggestions without actually penalizing your grade.

Grading Issues / Regrade Requests

Regrades are handled on Gradescope. We will close regrade requests roughly one week after assignments are returned.

Attendance and Participation (30% / 30 points)

Attendance is required for this course. Bring your laptop to every lecture. Lectures will include some quick quizzes used both to verify comprehension and attendance. Generally, correct answers will be worth full credit and incorrect answers half credit (you were there, but didn’t get it right). Generally, we will ask at least three questions during class. Not all questions may count for attendance credit. We reserve the right to experiment with this mechanism a bit throughout the semester and vary when and how we ask questions or validate attendance.

Each week can earn up to 3 attendance and participation points. Any points over 30 points are worth half their value, that is if a student attends and participates for all 12 weeks, their total points earned from attendance and participation will be 30 + (0.5×6) = 33.

Notice that you can miss up to two weeks without any penalty. This is by design to accommodate unexpected illness, emergencies, travel for interviews, or any other situations. Please do not ask for excused absences for one-off issues that are already covered by this policy. If extenuating circumstances cause you to miss more than two weeks, please contact us and we can work something out.

We will not count attendance for the first week of class.

Advanced Exercises (30% / 30 points)

Each week (except the first and last) will have at least one advanced exercise option. The intention is to give a guided exploration of topics that people find most interesting. These advanced exercises will also be a little more time consuming (2-3 hours), have a little less guidance, and require you to research and discover a little on your own. Over the course of the semester, you are expected to do three of the advanced exercises.

Advanced exercises may only be submitted at office hours. Advanced exercises come with a deadline roughly two weeks after they are released, however it is your responsibility to ensure you select an office hours session to attend before the deadline. There are no office hours at 9:30PM on Saturday night.

We will aim to announce any changes to the regular office hours schedule at least one week in advance (via Piazza and the updated course calendar), however sometimes life happens, in which case we may adjust deadlines if necessary.

Advanced Exercises Grading

The advanced exercises are graded on a simple all or nothing system, either you did the whole thing or you did not.

The class is divided into four sections, Introduction and Basics, Developing, Being Efficient, and Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. To encourage you to get started early and spread the advanced exercises load across the semester, the first advanced exercise you submit from each section is worth 10 points. Another advanced exercise in the same section is worth 5 points. If you do one advanced exercise from each section, the final section's first advanced exercise is worth half: 5 points. If a student completes all 11 advanced exercise, they will earn (10 + 5) + (10 + 5 + 5) + (10 + 5 + 5 ) + (5 + 5 + 5) = 70 points.


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