Most office hour business can be handled by email. My address is vickery@qc.edu. Be sure to include "CS-701" in the subject line of every message you send me, and be sure to include your name in the body of each message.
If you want to see me in person, I will be available in my office, Science Building room A-222, for half an hour before each class.
Stevens, W. Richard
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
Addison-Wesley, 1992
ISBN 0-201-56317-7
Harbison, S. P. and Steele, G. L. Jr.
C: A Reference Manual, Fifth Edition
Prentice Hall, 1995
ISBN 0-13-0895929-X
There is one recommended reference book for the course:
Das, Sumitabha
Your UNIX: The Ultimate Guide
McGraw-Hill, 2001
ISBN 0-07-240500-7
Exam and assignment dates are given on the Course Schedule web page.
You must submit your own homework solutions, and you are expected to write all your own code. I do not claim I will be able to determine whether you actually do so, but if I do detect that you submit code based on another person's work, you will automatically fail the course. The idea is to use the assignments as a way to practice the material covered in the course, not as a test of your knowledge. The assignments will be graded on a 10 point scale, and I will provide you with feedback on your assignments insofar as I have time to do so. I will also provide copies of "correct" solutions to them after the due dates. I use shell scripts to help automate the grading process, and I will provide a copy of the script used along with each solution.
However I encourage you to interact with your classmates while working on the assignments. These interactions may include discussions about coding techniques and help locating (but not fixing) bugs. But the interactions do not include letting someone else have a copy of any of your code. I strongly encourage you to use the "Discussion Board" facility for the course available through QC Online as you work on the assignments, both to get answers to questions and to provide help to other students in the course. (You learn a lot by helping others.)
Exams will be a mixture of short answer questions plus a significant amount of code writing. The code you write will test how well you have mastered the programming concepts in the assignments you have done. Note, however, that it will not do any good just to memorize code, because the exam questions will be different from the assignment solutions.
You can check the scores I have recorded for your homework and exams at the Check Grades web page. To use this facility, you will need to supply a "codeword," which you will supply to me as part of your first homework assignment.
Grades become permanent and cannot be changed two weeks after they are posted, so be sure to monitor your grades regularly to be sure they are recorded correctly.