Syllabus for UCLA Computer Science 35L
Software Construction Laboratory

[35L home]

No textbook has been selected; online material will be referred to extensively.

Topics, labs and homeworks are tentative and may be changed as the schedule progresses.

Lectures

1. Introduction, files and editing

• Multiuser and multiprocess operating systems
• GUI basics (e.g., X, Wayland, GNOME, KDE)
• CLI basics (e.g., Bash, xterm)
• Unix file system layout
• Everything is a file — device files
• Unix permissions
• Basic commands: ls; pwd, cd, mkdir, rmdir; echo, cat; cp, mv, ln, rm; chmod, kill, ps
• Documentation and man pages
• Emacs basics: introduction, online tutorial (C-h t), help (C-h ?), basic editing, directory editing, running shell commands, building programs, Emacs Lisp.

2. Commands and basic scripting

• Unix wildcards, basic regular expressions
• More advanced commands (e.g., grep, find)
• Pipelines and redirection
• Simple shell scripting
• Idea of interpreted languages

3. More scripting, VMs, and construction tools

• Basics of Python
• Java as a compromise between interpreted and compiled languages
• Building from source
  • make
  • automake and autoconf

4. Change management

• diff and patch
• Basics of Makefiles
• Version control systems, e.g., Git, Subversion
  • retrieving a tree to build and install
  • committing a change
  • dealing with merge conflicts

5. Low-level construction and debugging

• The C compilation and linking process
• Introduction to C
• Debuggers and debugging tools, e.g., GDB, Valgrind, strace.

6. Systems programming

• C and system programming
• Library calls vs. system calls

7. Faults, failures, errors, and holes

• Ways in which a program can go wrong
• Buffer overruns, and techniques for avoiding them
• Ken Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust (1984). In 2003 Jon Hall was reported to have said that the paper is not a theoretical speculation.

8. Security basics

• Threats, including eavesdropping, tampering, forgery, and denial of service
• Authentication, authorization, and accounting
• Chains of trust
• Firewalls, kernels, and sandboxes
• Intrusion detection
• Backups
• Security policies

9. Parallelism

• SIMD versus vector processing versus MIMD
• Processes versus threads
• Synchronization
• POSIX threads
• OpenCL
• OpenMP
• Clusters, massive parallelism, grids, and clouds

10. The crystal ball

• Trends in computing research and development
• Things to increase your chances at grad school: research, 199's, etc
• Other general tips for excelling in upper division classes