Context: What You Need to Know When You Get Here
The computer science pathway at Arlington Tech has been designed from the
ground up
to be an integrated sequence of courses leading to a solid,
rigerous foundation in the field that will prepare students well for both
further study and employment.
While we highly encourage interested students to follow our full pathway beginning with DE Web Design, this document is for those students who want to join the path at other entry points.
Students enrolling in CSC 221 will be expected to have the following skills on arrival, as we will not be able to dedicate class time to aquiring them.
Managing Your Computer from the Unix CLI
We will work in a Unix
CLI
environment, using
Vim as our
text editor, and saving (and submitting
) our work in
git repositories.
You will need to be comfortable, not just familiar
with these
tools to keep up in this class.
Here are several resources to learn what you need:
- UNIX Tutorial for Beginners. Read Introduction to the UNIX Operating System and complete Tutorials One, Two, and Three.
- Terminus is a gamified way to learn / practice Unix CLI skills.
- VIM Tutor. At your linux terminal prompt, type:
vimtutorand hit enter. This loads a script that copies a text file to the/tmpand load it into vim. File contains a tutorial on using this power, but somewhat difficult to get used to at first editor. Use it to learn vim. - Vim School is a website designed to help you learn Vim.
- Vim Adventures helps you learn Vim keybindings by playing a game.
- Learn Git Branching is an interactive, online tutorial for git.
Some Programming Experience in Some Programming Language
We will start at the very beginning learning Python, but we will move fast. You will take the PCEP certification exam at the end of first quarter. Only students who earn the certification will be able to earn an A in the class.
Our Web students learned JavaScript, but as long as you have a bit of programming experience in any programming language, so that you are already familiar with conditional statements, loops, and functions, you will be fine in this class.