COMP2314C: Applied Linux Programming and Scripting - Fall 2021

Abstract

The Linux Operating System provides the infrastructure that powers the vast majority of the Internet. This course introduces you to Linux, with a focus on the operating system features that are accessible from the command line and programming or scripting languages such as Python and AWK. Through significant programming projects, you will learn how to develop and manage software within the Linux environment, with emphasis on applications that manipulate real-life datasets and interface with data obtained live from the Internet. Pre-requisite: COMP 1300C. This course assumes that you already know Python 3. We will cover the following topics in this course: the history of Linux and other “free software” and open source systems, the Linux command line (aka “the Shell”) and built-in features, permissions and processes, regular expressions, the “gawk” variant of the AWK programming language, version control and automated application building, HTML, advanced Python features (such as generators) and its libraries. We will also cover Hadoop and, Spark, which are systems used by Google, Yahoo, Yelp, and many other companies to do massively scalable computations on clusters of Linux computers. A significant part of this course involves actually writing AWK scripts and Python programs that address the above topics – in labs, for homework, on exams, and for a semester project. We will use publicly available databases as interesting and realistic examples similar to data that might be encountered in business settings.