Extended Unix and Computer Science Skills Tutorial

General Information

TA	Tyson Kendon	Office	ICT 716
Tutorial Times	Monday, Wednesday, Friday - 1pm	Location	MS 239

Notes

• If you're interested in some detailed history of the shell, IBM provides a good history and Nikolai Bezroukov provides a (somewhat biased, but interesting) history introduction.
• I suggest looking at this tutorial in Java World on using jdb. It's from 2000, but (sadly) there haven't been a lot of updates to jdb since then. Given that jdb is a reference implementation, you will probably find the more advanced tools in IDEs, such as eclipse, more powerful.
• If you need help getting started check out the Getting Started Guide.

Overview

When learning thing, in computer science, in software development, and in life, often you have to learn by doing. This tutorial is designed to help you learn by doing.

There are many skills that are important to learn while you are learning about computer science. Here, we've chosen to focus on five (and a half) of them that are useful for computer science at the University of Calgary. These are the *nix command line (both basic and advanced), debugging, version control, regular expressions and bash scripting.

Each tutorial is focused on one of these topics and there is a workbook that provides material to help you learn and questions that will prompt you to practice each othe topics discussed. In tutorial I'm there to help you work through the problems you run into. That being said, the workbooks are designed to allow you to work at your own pace, so you should feel free to tackle them on your own and free to contact me with any questions you have.

The tutorial is not mandatory. You should only do the tutorial for your own benefit. I can tell you that it should make it easier to do work in your other courses, give you a head start on problem solving skills and possibly give you a jump in the work place. At the end of the day though, it's up to you.

Although! We do want to offer you a way to show off that you've picked up good skills. We are doing that the the University of Calgary Badges Microcredentialling system. So if you'd like a badge to put on your webpage or on your LinkedIn all you need to do is submit a plain-text file with your answers to all the questions for each workbook to the appropriate dropbox in the Tutorial's D2L site.You can sign up for the D2L site by searching for Unix and Computer Science Skills in D2L. You can also get updates on the Tutorial through the site.

Below are outlines of the six tutorials and the topics they cover. I encourage you to pick the ones that are most relevant to your interests and that you think will benefit you the most and join us.

Tutorials