Lecture and section information

CS 2043, Spring 2016 Lecture time: MWF 11:15am - 12:05pm Location location: Hollister Hall B14

Staff and office hours

Lecturer: Stephen McDowell

• Tuesday: 6:00pm - 7:00pm, Gates G19

Notice

Do not, under any circumstances, e-mail any of the TAs directly. All questions / queries for help should be done in person during office hours, or on the course Piazza. If there is something urgent going on, you should e-mail me directly.

TA: Abhishek Agarwal

• Tuesday: 1:30pm - 2:30pm, Gates G17
• Thursday: 5:30pm - 6:30pm, Gates G17

TA: Jerome Francis

• Monday: 2:30pm - 3:30pm, Gates G13
• Friday: 2pm - 5pm, Gates G13

TA: Joseph Marino

• Wednesday: 10am - 11am, Gates G13
• Thursday: 2pm - 3pm, Gates G13

TA: Peter McGahren

• Monday: 3:30pm - 4:30pm, Gates G13
• Wednesday: 3:30pm - 4:30pm, Gates G13

Catalog description

2 credits. S/U Only. UNIX and UNIX-like systems are increasingly being used on personal computers, mobile phones, web servers, and many other systems. They represent a wonderful family of programming environments useful both to computer scientists and to people in many other fields, such as computational biology and computational linguistics, in which data is naturally represented by strings. This course takes students from shell basics and piping, to regular-expression processing tools, to shell scripting and Python. Other topics to be covered include handling concurrent and remote resources, manipulating streams and files, and managing software installations.

Prerequisites

One programming course or equivalent programming experience. No previous knowledge of UNIX or expertise in any particular language is assumed.

Texts

None required, but I may add some external references on the Readings page.

Course technologies

• We will be working together on some selected programming / shell exercises in class, and you are encouraged to bring a laptop (or tablet) to fully participate.
• You will need a free GitHub account.
• You will need a Unix development environment (native install, or Virtual Machine).
• Please refer to the Getting Started page for more information.

Class material

Class material will be posted on GitHub, including the assignments, lecture slides, and lecture demos.

Student work will also be posted on GitHub in private repositories (don’t worry, we will discuss how these work in class). I will setup your repositories for you.

Course work

In-class work

It is in your best interest to attend lecture so you can participate in the demos. The purpose of the demos is to solidify what we have covered, in a “learning-by-doing” scenario. None of this will be graded or tracked in any way, and is strictly for practice.

Assignments

There will be around 5 assignments in all. All assignments will be done individually, though the final project may be groups of 2. We’ll talk about that option later in the course.

On weeks when an assignment is due, it will be due at 5pm EST on Friday. These deadlines are be posted on the Schedule page. This time was chosen to hopefully make your life easier; you are taking other classes and the majority should have non-conflicting deadlines with this time.

Submissions

You will be submitting all of your work through GitHub. This will be explained in gory detail during lecture, but effectively all you need to do is make sure that you have pushed your submission to your private repository on the master branch by the deadline and it is submitted. Don’t worry if you are unfamiliar with what this means, you will be shortly.

Feedback and Grade Postings

We will be providing you with feedback on the Cornell University Course Management System (CMS). We will grade your work as soon as reasonably possible, but you are encouraged to setup notifications on CMS so that you get an e-mail with when grades are released. Inside the purple navbar on the left after you have clicked on “CS 2043”, click on the “Notifications” section. Check the

• …grades for an assignment are released.

box and click “Update” at the bottom to receive an e-mail when grades for an assignment are released.

Grading

Each assignment will be worth 10 points. Your final grade will be determined by a weighted average of all your scores. I will not be releasing what this weighting scheme is, so please do not ask for it. The most I will say is that this is an S/U class, so if you had to label it 6 and above are S and 5 and below are U.

Were I to release an official weighting policy, I would be required to follow it. Ambiguity in this regard really does serve you best.

Course policies

Late work policy

As stated previously, assignments will be due by 5pm on Friday. This is a hard deadline. However, life happens. If you happen to need extra time, this is how it will work:

$\begin{array}{|l|c|} \hline \mathbf{\text{Submission Time} } & \mathbf{\text{Late Penalty}} \\ \hline \hline \text{Fri @5:01pm -- Fri @11:59pm} & \text{0.001 points } \\ \hline \text{Sat @12:01am -- Sat @5:00pm} & \text{1 point } \\ \hline \text{Sat @5:01pm -- Sun @5:00pm } & \text{2 points } \\ \hline \text{Sun @5:01pm -- Mon @5:00pm } & \text{3 points } \\ \hline \end{array}$

In words, you lose 1 point per 24hr period it is late with a quasi-grace period on Friday evening. No submissions will be accepted after 5pm on Monday.

Collaboration

An assignment is an academic document, like a journal article. When you turn it in, you are claiming everything in it is your original work, unless you cite a source for it.

As part of the process of learning development skills, you should attempt to develop and debug code for yourself. You are welome to discuss the assignments with other students at a high level, but you are forbidden – under any circumstances – to be in the posession of another students’ code. This includes, but is not limited to, looking at their code, copying their code, stealing their computer, hacking the servers…

Academic integrity

The assignments are there to teach you, and I assume you are interested in learning the material by being enrolled in the course. Cheating will teach you nothing, and can only stand to hurt you.

We expect academic integrity from everyone. School is stressful, and you may feel pressure from your coursework or other factors, but that is no reason for dishonesty! If you feel you can’t complete the work on the own, come talk to the professor, the TA, or your advisor, and we can help you figure out what to do.

For more information, see Cornell’s Code of Academic Integrity.

Code of conduct

We have a code of conduct for contributing to the class (adapted from the Contributor Covenant 1.2.0). In addition to not harrassing each other, note that you must not publish private information without permission.

With that in mind, we welcome any fixes / modifications to the course materials, including the website, lecture slides, assignment skeletons, etc. We will teach you how to submit pull-requests, any changes or fixes you would like to suggest should be done in this way.

Any code or documentation you post for inclusion in the main class repository should be released under an appropriate open license; see the contributing guidelines.

Emergency procedures

In the event of a major campus emergency, course requirements, deadlines, and grading percentages are subject to changes that may be necessitated by a revised semester calendar or other circumstances. Any such announcements will be posted to the course home page.