Syllabus for UCLA Computer Science 35L
Software Construction Laboratory

[class home]

No textbook is needed; online material will be referred to extensively.

Project

A major part of this course is a collaborative software project, in which student groups design and construct a user-facing application involving multiple software components that communicate across a network.

Lectures

Files, editing, and shells

• Multiuser and multiprocess operating systems
• CLI basics (e.g., Bash)
• Unix file system organization
• Basic shell commands: ls; pwd, cd, mkdir, rmdir; echo, cat; cp, mv, ln, rm; chmod, kill, ps, grep, find
• 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.

Commands and basic scripting

• The Unix shell as a scripting language
• Pattern matching, wildcards and regular expressions
• More advanced commands (e.g., grep, find)
• Pipelines and redirection
• Scripting for interactive applications, with Emacs Lisp as a case study

Scripting and construction

• Basics of Python
• Java as a compromise between interpreted and compiled languages
• Building from source
  • Dependencies (e.g., make, Apache Ant)
  • Makefile basics
  • Programming with dependencies (e.g., automake, autoconf)

Client-server apps and user interfaces

• Scriptable user interfaces via JavaScript
• HTML and web protocols
• Case study: Node.js and React.

Package management

• Dependencies and packages
• Installing a package
• Creating a package
• Package management case study: (e.g., Python packaging)

Change management

• Creating and using patches (e.g., diff and patch)
• File-based version control, e.g., RCS
• Package-based version control, e.g., CVS
• Decentralized version control, with Git as a case study
  • Commits
  • Branching and merging
  • Rebasing
  • Branching workflows
  • Searching
  • Advanced merging and conflict resolution
  • Remote branches
  • Submodules
  • Git internals

Low-level construction and debugging

• Introduction to C
• The C compilation and linking process
• Debuggers and debugging tools, e.g., GDB, Valgrind, strace.
• C and system programming
• Library calls vs. system calls
• Ways in which a program can go wrong at the low level (e.g., buffer overruns)
• Defenses against low-level misbehaviors