GCTAA CSC 222 Prerequisites

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 222 will be expected to have the following skills on arrival, as we will not be able to dedicate any 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: vimtutor and hit enter. This loads a script that copies a text file to the /tmp and 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.

HelloCSC

Now that you have the tools you need, let's have you create your first C++ program.

Use vim to create a text file named HelloCSC.cpp with the following contents:

  #include 
  using namespace std;

  int main()
  {
      cout << "Hello World from C++!" << endl;

      return 0;
  }

From the unix command prompt with the current working directory containing your HelloCSC.cpp file, run the following command:
```
  $ g++ HelloCSC.cpp
```
This will create a new file named a.out that contains the binary file that runs on your computer.
To run it, type:
```
  $ ./a.out
```
You should see the hello message from your program displayed in the consol (terminal) window.

A More Interesting Example

For a more interesting example, take a look at Exploring the bitwise operators from one of our early exercise sets.

Compile it, run it, and study its output.

Making Vim a Lightweight C++ IDE

We can bind function keys in Vim so that we don't need to leave the editor to compile and run our C++ code.

Use vim to create a text file named .vimrc in your home directory.

Take a look at Appendix C: A development environment for unit testing and set up the .vimrc you see there.