Systems Programming

Students will become intimately acquainted with the low-level software services that applications often take for granted. Through a broad, project-based survey of core system libraries and UNIX system calls, students will explore process management, memory management, linking and loading, threading, synchronization, filesystem operations, and inter-process communication (networking). In each area, students will build software using these building blocks, gaining an understanding of the behavior and efficiency of the tools at their disposal. Students will also gain experience building larger, more complex systems upon which applications can be built. This course is ideal for students who wish to understand and construct the software infrastructure upon which user-level software depends. (CSCI 0202) 3 hrs. lect