Lesson catalog

The shell as a real programming environment. By week three you can move through a filesystem, wire programs together with pipes, and read a man page without flinching.

1. Week 01
   • Unix History & the ShellWhere Unix came from, the three principles, and your first look at the terminal 8 min read Textbook pp. 35–38
   • Your First Commandswhoami, pwd, ls, cd, and the five-step process that runs every command you type 8 min read Textbook pp. 39–54 1 prereq
   • Files, Directories & Pathsmkdir, cd, cp, mv, rm — building and organizing your workspace from the command line 10 min read Textbook pp. 55–70 2 prereqs
2. Week 02
   • Man Pages & Getting HelpFour types of commands, the manual system, and how to answer your own questions 9 min read Textbook pp. 71–78 3 prereqs
   • File PermissionsThe 10-character permission string, chmod, and why 'permission denied' happens 10 min read Textbook pp. 113–130 4 prereqs
   • Redirection & Pipesstdout, stderr, stdin — rewiring program I/O and building data pipelines 10 min read Textbook pp. 81–90 4 prereqs
   • Shell EnvironmentPATH, .bashrc, environment variables, and configuring your shell 9 min read Textbook pp. 147–155 3 prereqs
   • Shell Expansion & QuotingHow the shell rewrites your commands before executing them — and how to control it 10 min read Textbook pp. 93–103 2 prereqs
3. Week 03
   • Grep & Regular ExpressionsSearching inside files with grep, matching patterns with regex, and finding files with find 10 min read Textbook pp. 89–90 2 prereqs
   • ProcessesPrograms vs processes, PIDs, job control, signals, and exit status 9 min read Textbook pp. 131–144 2 prereqs
   • Introduction to CYour first C program, what gcc actually does, and why we start in C90 12 min read Textbook pp. 14–35)

The paradigm shift from Java. Raw memory, manual allocation, and the pointer-arithmetic idioms every later week depends on.

1. Week 04
   • Java to CThe paradigm shift from managed-language CSCD 210 to raw-memory C, and every first-day mechanic you need for Lab 1 3 min read
   • Operators & ExpressionsArithmetic, comparison, logical, bitwise, and the one typo that sank more systems than any other 2 min read
   • Control Flow & FunctionsBranching, loops, and how C functions pass arguments by value 2 min read
2. Week 05
   • PointersThe address-of operator you have been using with scanf, generalized into the feature that makes C usable 3 min read
   • Dynamic MemoryStack vs heap, malloc and free, and the bug taxonomy you will meet for the rest of your career 3 min read
   • FilesFILE*, fopen, fread/fwrite, fscanf/fprintf, and why stderr exists 2 min read
   • Three-File Formatmain.c + lib.c + lib.h, the one-definition rule, and why programs split cleanly or painfully 2 min read
3. Week 06
   • Structs & typedefBundling related data into one type, and how the -> operator reads through a struct pointer 2 min read
   • Arrays of Structs & SortingOrganizing collections of records, and the two sorts you should be able to write from scratch 2 min read
   • 2D ArraysRows and columns, row-major memory layout, and why pointer arithmetic still works 2 min read

Generic code with void pointers and function pointers, heap-connected data structures, and the Unix system calls that make a shell possible.

1. Week 07
   • void *The type-erased pointer, C's answer to generic programming 2 min read
   • Function PointersPointers to code, not data, and the declaration syntax that looks worse than it is 2 min read
   • Generic Containers & qsortPutting void * and function pointers together into libraries that work on anything 2 min read
2. Week 08
   • Linked ListsThe first heap-allocated, pointer-connected data structure 2 min read
   • Recursion on Linked StructuresWhen the data structure recurses, the traversal usually should too 2 min read
   • Trees (preview)Nodes with two children, and the three traversal orders 2 min read
3. Week 09
   • Processes (fork & exec)How Unix spawns programs, and why every shell looks the way it does 2 min read
   • IPC (pipes & signals)How two processes share bytes (pipes) and how they interrupt each other (signals) 2 min read
   • SynthesisTying the course together in one final program 1 min read