CS2013-final-report

CSE333: Systems Programming, University of Washington
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Steven D. Gribble
gribble@cs.washington.edu
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse333/11sp
Knowledge Areas that contain topics and learning outcomes covered in the course
Knowledge Area
Total Hours of Coverage
Systems Fundamentals (SF) 8
Operating Systems (OS) 7
Programming Languages (PL) 5
Networking and Communication (NC) 3
Architecture and Organization (AR) 3
Software Engineering (SE) 3
Information Management (IM) 1
Where does the course fit in your curriculum
This is an optional course taken by undergraduates in their second year, following at least CS1, CS2, and a
hardware/software interface course. Students are encouraged to have taken data abstractions/structures. The
course is a prerequisite for several senior-level courses, including operating systems, networking, and computer
graphics. Approximately 60 students take the course per offering; it is offered four times per year (i.e., once each
quarter, including summer).
What is covered in the course
The major goal of the course is to give students principles, skills, and experience in implementing complex,
layered systems. The course includes a quarter-long programming project in which students: (a) build rudimentary
data structures in C, such as linked lists, chained hash tables, AVL trees; (b) use them to build an in-memory
inverted index and file system crawler; (c) construct a C++-based access methods for writing indexes to disk and
accessing disk-based indexes efficiently; and (d) construct a concurrent (threaded or event-driven) web server that
exposes a search application.
A substantial portion of the course focuses on giving students in-depth C and C++ skills and experience with
practical engineering tools such as debuggers, unit testing frameworks, and profilers. The course stresses the
discipline of producing well-structured and readable code, including techniques such as style guidelines and code
reviews. Additionally, the course covers topics such as threaded vs. event-driven concurrency, the Linux system
call API, memory management, and some security and defensive programming techniques.
The full list of course topics is:
C programming
◦ pointers, structs, casts; arrays, strings
◦ dynamic memory allocation
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