CSSE 332 – Course Resources

This page contains information that is resourceful to students and may help them excel in this class.  Resources for LINUX, C, and the course as a whole are accessible from this page. Students are advised to visit this page often as it may be updated on a regular basis.

Software Installation

• Installing Ubuntu -- Ubuntu is the LINUX Distro of choice because we receive support from Rose-Hulman's LINUX users group
• Make sure your machine is equipped with these packages:
  • build-essential
  • manpages-dev glibc-doc
  • subversion
  • gcc
  • gdb
  • make
  • emacs or vim or editor of your choice

  You can install build-essential, for example, by typing the following at a LINUX terminal: sudo apt-get install build-essential and hitting ENTER.

Software Development Resources for programming in the LINUX environment

• A thorough makefile tutorial -- An introduction to "make" for Handling Software Projects
• Introduction to LINUX and C (using a remote Windows machine)-- A brief introduction to LINUX and the C programming language
• Introduction to LINUX and C (using a local LINUX machine) -- A brief introduction to LINUX and the C programming language
• Using SVN on LINUX -- These are instructions on using SVN in the LINUX environment
• Emacs Reference Card -- A summary of commands that may help you survive an emacs session
• GDB Tutorial -- A brief tutorial to help you get up to speed with the GDB debugger (This might become your friend)
• GDB Reference Card -- A summary of the commands you can use with the GDB debugger
• UNIX Programming Tools -- A collection of tools that facilitate programming in the UNIX/LINUX environment by Nick Parlante
• The exec family of functions -- These functions are used to overlay a process' image with another program.  They are typically used to replace the process image of a child process with another executable when the fork() system call is used to spawn child processes.
• POSIX Threads Programming -- great tutorial and examples of using pthreads.
• Threads:  Basic theory and libraries -- A great read on threads and the theory behind them.
• IPC: Shared Memory -- good source for information on programming with shared memory.
• UNIX System Calls and Subroutines using C -- the name is self explanatory
• Using dup and dup2 -- Might be helpful in redirecting output to a file.
• dup2 -- Might be helpful for redirecting input and output.
• UNIX pipe examples -- Example Programs that use pipes.
• UNIX Pipe -- Mapping UNIX pipe descriptors to stdin and stdout in C.

Reference Documents

• The ASCII Table -- Character codes for the ASCII character set (128 characters).
• The Extended ASCII Table -- Character codes for the extended ASCII character set (256 characters).
• The Unicode Consortium -- Find out more about Unicode. Covers all major spoken languages.

C Programming

• Eccential C - An introducton to C -- A concise introduction to C by Nick Parlante
• C Operator Precedence Table -- How do you decide which operators to apply first?
• The C Standard Library -- Need to include certain header files to access some functionalities.
• Pointers and Memory Management -- A tutorial on pointers and memory management by Nick Parlante
• Linked List Basics -- A tutorial on linked-list by Nick Parlante
• Linked List Problems -- Problems and solutions on linked-list by Nick Parlante
• Function Pointers -- valuable for pthreads and other projects
• Macros with a Variable Number of Arguments -- This can be useful in displaying debug information when a debug flag is specified
• C Language Gotchas -- An interesting example is printing values of type pid_t.