Course information

Important links

• Miscellaneous resources
• Sample programs
• Office hours
• Using other people's code (general)
• Using other people's code (CS208-specific)

Office hours are for you!

Want to ask me questions? Even if they're vague (e.g., "I just don't get topic X")? Even if they're not about this class? Want to just chat or talk over something you're thinking about? Then office hours are for you. Come see me. I like talking to you.

Book

The textbook for this class is Dive Into Systems, a freely available online textbook by Suzanne Matthews, Tia Newhall, and Kevin Webb.

You may also find this book helpful: The C Programming Language, 2nd edition by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. This book, often known as "K & R" after its authors, has been the essential reference and tutorial for C since 1978, and remains one of the cleanest and best introductions to any programming language ever written. I'm not requiring it for the course, since there are many C resources online and I like to keep the cost of textbooks down, but still, this is a great book that would be worth your time to read.

Grading

Your grade in the course will be determined by your performance on homework, labs, and quizzes (40%), two in-class midterm exams (20% each, weeks 4 and 8 or 9), and a takehome final (20%).

Laptops in class

On one hand, using your laptop in class can be bad for you and for your classmates.

On the other hand, we'll do at least a little lab work in class most days, for which you'll want to have a way to use a browser and a Unix command line.

So, here are my suggestions. (1) Bring your laptop, but leave it stowed until we start a lab. (2) Want or need to use a laptop for notes? Then (2.1) don't multitask, and (2.2) sit in the back row of the classroom so you don't distract your classmates.

Homework

• Handing it in. You will submit your homework via Moodle. The specifics of what to hand in will be included with each assignment.

• Due date and time. Each assignment will have a due date specified on the course home page. Unless otherwise specified, the due time will be 5:00PM on the due date if it's a Friday, or 11:59PM otherwise. If your assignment is late by a small amount (half an hour or less), I won’t count it as late.
• Extensions. You may use up to two free 24-hour extensions. To use one of your free extensions, just hand in the homework up to 24 hours late—no need to tell me ahead of time. You may only use one extension per assignment without prior permission.

• Other late homework. Once you have used your two free extensions, work handed in after the due time but within 24 hours will be docked 50%. After that, you will receive no credit for the assignment.

  The goals of this late-homework policy are: to give you a push to do the work in a timely way to support your learning, to provide a framework of fairness, to give you a little bit of breathing room on those occasions when your work gets too heavy, and to enable the graders to do their work reasonably efficiently.

  If you have a special circumstance and check with me ahead of time, I may be willing to extend a due date beyond the two automatic extensions. And of course, emergencies of various sorts can also result in extensions. Just talk to me if you need help.

Communication

Outside class time, I will communicate with you via the course website and our Slack workspace. I will send you the Slack invitation before the start of the term. You should plan to check the Slack #announcements and #questions channels once per day to make sure you have the most timely information about the course.

Collaboration

Working with your classmates is almost always a great thing. Sharing insights is fun and can enhance everybody's learning.

The main danger of collaborating on course work is in allowing your collaborator to do all the work, and thus all the learning.

For homework assignments (unless otherwise directed), you will submit your work individually. Though you may discuss your work with classmates, you need to write your own code, your own analysis, your own documentation, etc.

If you have any doubts about what constitutes acceptable collaboration, let me know.

Academic integrity and using other people's code

This is a big topic, so I have a generic page specifically about using other people's code in CS classes. Please read it.

With that in mind, here are a few specifics about my expectations when you're programming for CS208.

• Classmates. Feel free to talk with classmates about your work. Talking about approaches to the problem is great for getting the benefits of collaboration while also learning the material yourself. For the most part, I discourage but don't prohibit looking at each other's code in person. But you should not accept code from a classmate, either digitally or on paper, nor should you hand over your own code to somebody else. You need to write your own code, and so do they.
• Lab assistants, friends, and other helpers. Lab assistants usually try to guide you to your own solutions, but sometimes they'll just show you how to do something for efficiency's sake. If they say something like "here, just let me do it", stop them. That's inhibiting your learning instead of helping. (I admit to being guilty of this myself occasionally, so feel free to stop me too.)

• Cite your sources. If you submit code copied or adapted from another source and you cite that source clearly enough, then I won't consider you in violation of academic integrity policies. That said, to get points for an assignment, you need to write most of the code yourself. How much is "most"? That's a subjective decision that's up to me to make depending on the situation.

  The moral of the story: be straight with me about where your code comes from, and do your best to minimize your reliance on external sources so you can maximize your opportunity for learning.

• Learning is the goal, so understand what you borrow. Don't just copy and paste. Figure out what that Stack Overflow or random blog-post code is doing before you build it into your project. Once you understand the code, you can refine it to be just what you need. Otherwise, you're just guessing and hoping.

What about LLMs?

Educators at all levels and in all disciplines are experimenting to try to figure out the long-term implications of large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, etc. In computer science, we're also thinking about code generation tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Windsurf, etc.

Policy for this term will be posted here after we discuss it in class.

Rough Schedule

• Weeks 1-3: data representation, the C programming language, and C pointers
• Weeks 4-6: assembly and machine languages, simple reverse engineering
• Week 7-8: buffer overflow; Unix processes
• Week 9: networking with sockets
• Week 10: catchup and wrap-up