Syllabus for UCLA Computer Science 35L
Software Construction Laboratory

[35L home]

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

For some of the later labs you will need a Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Wireless Development Board (TI AM335x WiFi+BT); make sure you get the wireless version as opposed to the cheaper plain version. You may wish to get the higher-priced Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Wireless IOT Kit, as this is a superset of the basic unit needed for 35L, and is used by CS 111 this quarter (and likely in later quarters, though this is not guaranteed). These units are available from Seeed, Amazon, Digi-Key, Mouser Electronics, Verical, and other sources.

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)
• 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 basics

• Basics of Makefiles
• diff and patch
• retrieving a package to build and install
• Basic version control, e.g., Git, Subversion
  • 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. Advanced change management

• commits
• branching and merging
• rebasing
• branching workflows
• searching
• advanced merging and conflict resolution
• remote branches
• submodules
• Git internals

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