5570: Advanced Unix Programming

Fall 2002

Instructor: Ashok Srinivasan Office hours: TW 2:15 - 3:15 pm, or by appointment. Location: 169, Love Building Phone: 644-0559, Email: asriniva@cs.fsu.edu Course web site: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~asriniva/courses/aup02

Grader: Yan Mao
Office hours: T 3:15 pm - 4:15 pm, or by appointment.
Location: TBA
Email: mao@cs.fsu.edu

Lecture hours: MWF 1:25 pm - 2:15 pm, LOV 103

Prerequisites:

Text books:

1. Required: UNIX Network Programming, Volume 1: Networking APIs - Sockets and XTI, Second edition, W. Richard Stevens, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1997 (Referred to as UNP).
   • This book assumes knowledge of (i) processes, their creation and termination, (ii) signals and signal handlers, (iii) files, open file descriptions, file descriptors, and related material. The following book provides detailed information on those topics.

2. Recommended: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, W. Richard Stevens, Addison-Wesley, 1993 (23rd printing 2001), (Referred to as APUE).
   • Topics mentioned above will be discussed during the first few weeks of classes, to provide background material for those not familiar with those topics. This book will be useful then, and is therefore strongly recommended.
   
   Other references

3. IETF Request for Comments: http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html.

4. The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6 IEEE Std 1003.1-2001: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/ (OG).

5. The C Programming Language, second edition, B. W. Kernighan and D. M. Ritchie, Prentice Hall, 1988.

6. Online man pages. Section 2 documents the OS system service calls, and Section 3 the C library functions. For example, use man ps to see the man(ual)-page for the ps command. Use man -k keyword to see all the man pages for a particular keyword.

Course rationale:

Course description:

File access and attributes, I/O issues, signals, concurrent programming with processes and threads, network programming, client-server paradigm.

Course objectives:

Grading criteria:

Weekly quizzes	15
Attendance and class participation	5
Group project	10
Programming assignments	25
Two Midterm Exams	10 + 15 = 25
Final Exam	20

Your grade will be based on the scores obtained in the above categories, with weights as given above. Additionally, you need to obtain a certain minimum average score on your exam grades (quizzes + midterms + finals). Examples are given below, later.

Course average	Minimum exams average (%)	Letter grade
90 - 100	90	A
87 - 90	85	A-
80-87	75	B
70-80	65	C
60 - 70	50	D
0 - 60	0	F

Examples

1. If you get 91% total and 93% on the exams, your grade will be A.
2. If you get 83% total and 73% on the exams, you will not get a 'B'. Your grade will be 'B-'.
3. If you get 83% total and 63% on the exams, you will get a 'C-'.

Attendance and class participation

You will be given a grade for class participation and attendance. In particular, I will ask questions during lectures, and you should perform well in these. I will also take into account positive contributions you make to the class, such as suggesting improvements to programming examples I present in class. Your attendance too will be considered. Attendance will be taken at the beginning of lectures. You will be marked absent if you are more than 5 minutes late. You may also lose points if you are regularly late by 0-5 minutes. You will also be marked absent if you leave before class ends! Missing four or fewer lectures will be considered good attendance.

Notes: (i) Your signature on the attendance sheet should match that on your FSU ID. (ii) You are responsible for making up for any materials missed due to absences, including announcements made in class. A missed exam can be made up only in extremely rare circumstances, and you should discuss it with me well ahead of time.

Grading programs

Program grades will be based primarily on functionality, portability, correctness, programming style, and documentation. Since one of the important goals of this course is to learn to write portable code, the assignments will be required to compile and execute correctly on different operating systems, without changing the source code.

Course policies:

• Deadlines: If your assignment is late, you will get a 20% reduction in points for up to one day late (ignoring weekends and university holidays), and 30% more for each subsequent day. Please do not depend on our watches being exactly synchronized; do submit a few minutes early. A submission that is late by 1 minute will still get the entire 20% penalty! (In order to help you deal with emergencies, we will excuse your first late submission from the 20% penalty, provided it is not late by more than one working day.)

• Cheating: You should not collaborate with anyone in any way while working on assignments (except with your team members, on the group project). Copying others' homework, replacing variable names in their code with different names, altering indentation, or making modifications to others' code, and submitting it as your own will all be considered forms of cheating. Students are expected to uphold the academic honor code published in "The Florida State University Bulletin" and the "Student Handbook". Please read the provisions of the Academic Honor Code: http://www.fsu.edu/Books/Student-Handbook/codes/honor.html. Also read the section on "Honor code" below.

• ADA: Students with disabilities needing academic accommodation should (1) register with and provide documentation to the Student Disability Center, and (2) bring a letter to the instructor indicating the need for accommodation and what type. This should be done during the first week of class. This syllabus and other class materials will be made available in alternative format upon request.

Honor code:

Plagiarism is "representing another's work or any part thereof, be it published or unpublished, as one's own. . . . For example, plagiarism includes failure to use quotation marks or other conventional markings around material quoted from any source" (Florida State University General Bulletin 1998-1999, p. 69). Failure to document material properly, that is, to indicate that the material came from another source, is also considered a form of plagiarism. Copying someone else's program, and turning it in as if it were your own work, is also considered plagiarism.

What I expect from the student:

• I am particularly strict about deadlines and following instructions. Please read instructions carefully, and schedule your activities so that you submit assignments well in time. You should check your garnet email account and the class web page regularly, and note other announcements, online and in class.

• Note that many of the programming assignments for this course involve writing code that can result in errors non-deterministically. Therefore, you should think of all error possibilities, and also test you code several times.

• I expect you to complete any reading assignments when you come to class, since I will assume you have learned the material. (You should read the entire reading assignment, and not just the issues we discussed in class. In fact, you should probably read the material not discussed in class even more carefully!)

• You should participate in the class by asking questions, suggesting ideas, etc.

• In exams, I test knowledge, understanding, and creativity. When you learn some topic, you should not just try to understand the material, but also analyze what would happen if some things were different.

Lecture plan:

Other course links:

• Lectures: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~asriniva/courses/aup02/lectures.html.