Governor's Career & Technical Academy Arlington

CSC 221 Weekly Assignments: Week 1

CSC 221


Overview

Welcome to Computer Science 221!

This week we get oriented to our learning environment, and begin to establish the processes we will use to learn together. Specifically, we need to get started with:

  1. Communications tools and protocols. How do we meet communicate, share information, and work together? My goal will be to find ways of communicating that are as unobtrusive as possible, so that we can focus on learning to program, the raison d'etre of our being here.
  2. Skills and tools for software development. In order to develop software, it is first necessary to learn to manage your computer using the computer's command-line interface (CLI), including learning to use a console based text editor, which for us will be Vim.
  3. Revision control. We will use git as both a software development tool and a commuications tool. You will submit all of your work for evaluation through your git repository.

Thursday, August 31st

Classwork

Today in class we will work toward the following goals:

  1. Use ssh-keygen to create an ssh public and private key pair, upload the public key to your git host, and then clone the git repository you made last class to your local computer.
  2. Introduce you to Markdown and walk you through the git add - commit - push cycle using your README.md to practice with.
  3. Discuss the Unix CLI commands you will need to learn and prepare you for your homework.

Homework

Read lessons 1, 2, and 4, from Getting Down with the Unix CLI. Practice each of the commands introduced, until you feel you are ready to use ls (with options), pwd, cd, mkdir, rmdir, rm, cp, and mv to manage files in the file system.

Evaluation

We will use the random student picker to choose some of you to lead the class in completing exercises similar to those at the end of Lesson 4 when we come to class on Wednesday.

Tuesday, August 29th

Classwork

During class today you will install git along with the other software tools you will need for this class, and begin learning about the Unix CLI.

You will also create a git repository and share its URL.

Visit irc.novawebdevelopment.org, use your firstname_lastname as your Nickname, click the Connect button to join the chat, and paste a message with your name and the URL of your repo into the chat.

If time permits, we will install the GASP Python module.

Homework

Read Sheet 1: Introducting Python from the GASP Beginners Python Course, trying out all of the examples.