Instructor

Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera, LWSN 1210. Available any time for short questions, or make an appointment.

Class Homepage

An updated syllabus, class handouts, lecture notes, and other information can be found at:

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/cs252

Textbook

Book Online: Introduction to Systems Programming: a Hands-on Approach by Gustavo A. Junipero Rodriguez-Rivera and Justin Ennen
See Lecture Notes section of the web page. Book is still in progress.

Recommended: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens. (Useful for the shell. Good as a reference book.)

Goal

After successfully completing this course:

• You will consolidate the programming skills from the previous core courses.
• You will understand how programs run in user space and how the interact with the OS.
• You will be able to write large programs (>1000 lines).
• You will be able to use tools like IDEs, debuggers, profilers, and source control to help them write good and maintainable code.
• You will learn how to work in teams.
• Use of Scripting Languages.
• You will learn to write multi-process and multi-threaded programs.

Note: This couse does not cover OS internals. That will be covered in the Operating Systems Course.

Course Organization

The course is organized in lecture sessions and help sessions (PSOs). You are encouraged to attend the PSOs every week since the instructors will explain details of the class projects and also answer questions.

Lists and Announcements:

Grade Distribution

The final grade will be about 50% midterm and final exams, 40% projects and homeworks, 10% attendance.

Syllabus

• Address space. Structure of a Program. Text, Data, BSS, Stack Segments.
• Review of Pointers, double pointers, pointers to functions
• Use of an IDE and debugger to program in C and C++.
• Executable File Formats. ELF, COFF, a.out.
• Development Cycle, Compiling, Assembling, Linking. Static Libraries
• Loading a program, Runtime Linker, Shared Libraries.
• Scripting Languages. sh, bash, basic UNIX commands.
• File creation, read, write, close, file mode.
• IO redirection, pipes
• Fork, wait, waitpid, signals.
• Directories, creating, directory list.
• Project: Writing your own shell.
• Programming with Threads, thread creation.
• Race Conditions, Mutex locks.
• Socket Programming.
• Iterative and concurrent servers.
• Memory allocation. Problems with memory allocation. Memory Leaks, Premature Frees, Memory Smashing, Double Frees.
• Introduction to SQL
• Source Control Systems (CVS, SVN) and distributed (GIT, Mercurial)
• Introduction to Software Engineering
• Design Patterns
• Execution Profiling.