wallagh@tjalk.cs.vu.nl (Wallagh Serge R) (06/10/89)
At the University of Amsterdam the computerscience students have to learn Unix in there second year. There are afcourse enough books about Unix, but as students are always sort of money, they strongly prefer a syllabus. The student organisation (which I'm part of) has been asked to write such a syllabus. But why should we re-invent the wheel? Somewhere must be already a Unix course, which we can use. In a perfect world it would be for free, but we are willing to pay some money. So, to be precise: We (the student organisation) are looking for a (more or less) public domain Unix course (written material, not a tutor-program) which we are alowed to copy for all the new second-year computer science students. Pls, if you have material you want to share, reply. You would really help us a lot!! Serge Wallagh (wallagh@cs.vu.nl) BTW. pls. e-mail replies, as I'm not a frequent reader of this group.
dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi) (06/11/89)
In article <2360@botter.cs.vu.nl> wallagh@cs.vu.nl writes: >At the University of Amsterdam the computerscience students have to >learn Unix in there second year. Learning about one specific operating system has been out of style for some years in true computer science programs. Teach them about operating systems in general, and include ideas not only from UNIX but from other operating systems as well. If you must teach them only about a single operating system in one course, that course really should to be optional, else you are making a decision for them that you ought to be teaching them to make for themselves. Two similar courses I taught in the recent past included: High-level I/O versus low-level I/O; pipes; fork & exec family; I/O redirection; ctime, utime, time routines; interprocess communication using pipes and sockets; signals; interpreting info obtained from fstat. The only sort-of suitable book available is by Marc Rochkind. Unfortunately Rochkind assumes System V == UNIX. Most of what he says about 4.xBSD is in the preface. You might want to include some shell programming. I would include: sh, csh (+ job control), awk, sed, test, e/f/grep, expr, and scripts that use these. -- Rahul Dhesi <dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> UUCP: ...!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi Career change search is on -- ask me for my resume
jeffrey@algor2.UUCP (Jeffrey Kegler) (06/23/89)
In article <7686@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi) writes: >In article <2360@botter.cs.vu.nl> wallagh@cs.vu.nl writes: >>At the University of Amsterdam the computer science students have to >>learn Unix in their second year. > >Learning about one specific operating system has been out of style for >some years in true computer science programs. Teach them about >operating systems in general, and include ideas not only from UNIX but >from other operating systems as well. I am no longer close enough to academia to know whether the "issues" approach or the "case study" approach is more in fashion, but must say that I completely disagree with Rahul about their respective merits. My own operating systems courses were "issues" courses. I do not believe that students (or anyone) can really understand the tradeoffs involved in these operating system issues, unless they know at least one operating system thoroughly. I feel my own real understanding of operating systems came from learning UNIX, not from the survey of scheduling algorithms, etc. I had in school. So, Amsterdam, by all means teach them operating systems by teaching them UNIX. For advanced courses, teach them more UNIX. For the very advanced courses, give them a survey of scheduling, disk allocation, etc., once the students can really understand what you are talking about. -- Jeffrey Kegler, President, Algorists, jeffrey@algor2.UU.NET or uunet!algor2!jeffrey 1762 Wainwright DR, Reston VA 22090