Courses with significant overlap with this course:

Semester of last offering:

Date of approval: dd-mmm-yyyy

Prerequisites: ESC101A

Course Contents

1. Basic operating system commands. Students are expected to know the basic shell (e.g., bash) commands and should be able to understand the options and functioning of a command by reading the man and info pages.

2. Editors. Again, students are expected to be familiar with at least one of the two editors vim and emacs. How ever, they should be able to utilize the multiple features of the editors (such as automatic indentation, on text sensitive coloring, le type sensitive auto wrap, etc.) and not use them simply as a typewriter.

3. Version control. Students will need to completely know how at least one of the version control systems (e.g., cvs, svn, git, dares) work. They should be able to check in, check out, resolve errors and put tags on a snapshot. On all subsequent assignments, they must use a form of version .control.

4. Scripting and automation. Of the various types of shells (bash, csh, tcsh, ksh), the preferred choice is bash, although students should be familiar with the different command syntax in other shells as well. Also, they will need to know the various functions (e.g., seq, for) that a shell provides. The choice of the scripting language (per! or python) is open to students.

5. Document preparation. Students will learn using latex for preparing documents. They should also know how to format properly the equations, gures, tables, theorems, etc. using different packages and options. For bibliography management, they should use bibtex, and must use it within the latex documents. For drawing gures and graphs, they can choose to learn some or all of the different software’s used popularly (they include gnu plot, xfig, etc.).

6. Hardware. Students will work hands on to learn how to install hard drives, RAM, etc., and in general, assemble a computer from its different parts.

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