Contact Information

Instructor: John Barr
Office: 401A Williams Hall
Phone: 4-3579
E-Mail: barr@ithaca.edu

Announcements

• InfoWorld has several articles about virtualization, both software and hardware, here.

• There's a very interesting article on the future direction of the major computer companies (Microsoft, IBM, Sun) here.

• You can find Linux system call examples here
• What's the best job to have in America? CNN Money claims that it is software engineering!
• CNN has an article on a report that claims that "Tech workers are back in hot demand".
• Another article on the need for computer scientists. An article on the IBM website discusses the dreastic decline in computer science majors and the growing need for computer scientists.
• Exam 2 will take place in Williams 221 on Thursday, 30 March, 6-8PM.
• Exam 2 will take place Thursday, 30 March, 6-8PM in a room TBA.
• Check out the list on this site about the average salaries for programmers in different languages.
• Here is the current errata for the 3rd ed. of the Warford book.
• There is no instruction manual for pep/8 and, unfortunately, the interface is somewhat different from pep/7. Most of the interface will be explained in class, but I'll put some tid-bits here as I run across them.

• Pep/8 syntax rules.
• The 4 boxes at the far right of the button bar are an automatic converter. Enter a decimal number in the first box, and its hex and binary equivelant will be displayed. Enter a hex number in the second box and its decimal and binary equivalents will be displayed. The last box takes characters. When a character is entered in this box its ASCII code will be displayed in the previous three boxes.
• In the Pep/8 source window, assembly language code is displayed (files end with ".pep").
• In the Pep/8 object code window, machine language is displayed (files end with ".pepo").
• In the Pep/8 source listing window, there is combined source code and machine code (files end with ".pepl").
• To load a data file into pep/8, choose the "Batch I/O" input window, the go to the File menu and choose open. My experience so far is that the file will load to the output window and you'll have to copy the contents to the input window.

• ssh is working on icsun. I've tested the connection from my office, but not from home. You should be able to ssh to icsun from off campus now.
• I'll accept practicum 4 without penalty as late as the beginning of class on Wednesday.
• Still worried about outsourcing? A report from ACM (the principle professional organization for computer scientists) says that at most 2-3% of U.S. IT jobs will go overseas in the next decade. Plus, more new jobs will be created in that time than are lost! See the article at CNET news. The report notes that employment in the IT field today is higher than it was at the height of the dot-com boom. Update: CNN also has an article on this report.
• I'll hold a review session on Tuesday, 14 February, at 4PM in Williams 309.
• Reminder: The first exam is Thursday, February 16 in a Williams 221.!
• Want more information about how stuff works on your computer? Try the How Stuff Works web site.
• Here's an CNN article on Mike Potter's CellFlix win.
• More good job news. According to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5 out of the 10 fastest growing jobs in the U.S. are computer science related. Check it out!
• You can access the Linux server by using ssh to remotely log in from any computer on campus (including dorms). You may be able to log in from off campus; I haven't tried that yet. To log in, follow the instructions below.

• You must use a ssh program to log in. If you are using a mac, then ssh is available in the terminal window. If you are using a XP machine, you'll probably have to download a ssh client like putty You can download putty for free from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html Download the putty.exe program to remotely login to your account and download psftp.exe to transfer files to the server.
• If you are using putty.exe then start the application and enter 147.129.97.32 into the box named "Host Name (or IP address)" and then click on the open button. If you get a dialog box with a security alert, just click "yes". Then enter your email name as the login name and use the password that you entered in class last week. You'll then get a command line prompt.
• If you're using ssh, then at the command line in the terminal window type "ssh yourAccountName@147.129.97.32" Substitute your email name for "yourAccountName". You should get prompted for your password. Enter the password that you entered in class last week. You should then get a command prompt.

• I've added some more references to the practicum.
• Welcome to 312-21000, Spring 2006!
• Worried about getting a job in CS? There's an article here that points out that there are a shortage of IT professionals right now and for the forseeable future. There is some outsourcing, but there has also been an explosive growth in the need for IT professionals at all levels. Another article about the explosive job growth in the IT sector can be found here.
• Note that the correct command for disassembling code in gdb is disassem
• There are some array/pointer examples posted to help you understand the relationship between pointers and arrays: Examples ex3.2.c , ex3.5.c, and ex3.6.c

Course Material

• Lab examples.

• Survey

• Required Books

• Syllabus

• Practicum Syllabus

• Study Guide

• Lecture slides
• ITS Computer Lab Schedule Practicums involving Unix/gcc can be completed in any lab. Use telnet to access icsun.
• You can download the pep/8 simulator here. Pep/8 is free and are versions for Windows XP/Mac OSX/Linux. The Linux version is an early beta and does not run very well.
• Here is the current errata for the 3rd ed. of the Warford book.

Reference Material

• Unix tutorials:
• UNIX Tutorial for Beginners
• A Basic UNIX Tutorial
• UNIX
• Norman Matloff's Unix and Linux Tutorial Center. The tutorials are in pdf format.
• A UNIX Tutorial.
• gcc tutorials:

• Little Unix Programmers Group (LUPG)'s Tutorials. Look in the "UNIX Beginners" section. This actually covers cc, but gcc operates in a very similar manner.
• COMP 2103 Linux Tutorial - gcc - Self-study material.
• EWS Tutorial - gcc.
• Compiling C and C++ Programs

• More information about computer hardware (and how it works) can be found at http://computer.howstuffworks.com/
• Here's a web site named The Perils of Floating Point that demonstrates some of the problems with programming floating point code (in any language). I've implemented some of this code in C here

Practicums

• Practicum 1
• Practicum 2
• Practicum 3
• Practicum 4
• Practicum 5
• Practicum 12
• Practicum 13

return to top of page

• Problem Set 1
• Problem Set 2

• Solution for PS 2

• Problem Set 3
• Problem Set 4
• Problem Set 5

Problem set 5 solution, part 1.
Problem set 5 solution, part 2.
Problem set 5 solution, part 3.


• Problem Set 6
• Problem Set 7
• Problem Set 8
• Problem Set 9
• Problem Set 10
• Problem Set 11

return to top of page

• Exam 1 topic list.
• An example exam 1. Note that not all of the topics on this example exam will be covered in the exam this semester. Plus, there are some topics that will be covered on this semester's exam that were not on the 1999 exam.
• Exam 2 topic list.
• An example exam 2. Note that not all of the topics on this example exam will be covered in the exam this semester (e.g., cgi formatting).
• Exam 3 (ie Final) topic list.
• An example final exam. Note that not all of the topics on this example exam will be covered in the exam this semester and not all topics that you are responsible for are covered on this exam (e.g., two-dimensional arrays will be on your final exam).

Return to Student Pages

Return to John Barr's Home Page

Last updated on 07 Jul 2006 by John Barr