COMS 3157 Advanced Programming

Fall 2022 Course Overview

Class time: Tuesdays and Thursdays 4:10pm–5:25pm

Class location: 417 International Affairs Building (IAB)

Recitations:

Fridays 7pm–8:30pm in Mudd 524
Sundays 7pm–8:30pm in CSB 451
Mondays 7:15pm–8:45pm in Uris 301

Instructor: John Hui

Instructor office hours:

Tuesdays 5:30pm–7pm in CSB 488
Fridays 2pm–3:30pm in CSB 488
See also Office Hours

Exams

There will be three synchronous, in-person exams:

Oct 06 (Thursday), 4:10pm–5:25pm: Midterm #1
Nov 17 (Thursday), 4:10pm–5:25pm: Midterm #2
Dec 20 (Tuesday), 4:20pm–6:20pm: Final

All registered students must take the exams at those times. There are no make-up or alternate exams. If you cannot make any of those exams, please take the course next semester.

Labs

Lab 1 (80 points), due Sep 20 (Tuesday)
Lab 2 (101 points), due Oct 02 (Sunday)
Lab 3 (100 points), due Oct 16 (Sunday)
Lab 4 (100 points), due Oct 28 (Friday)
Lab 5 (80 points), due Nov 12 (Saturday)
Lab 6 (130 points), due ~~Nov 28 (Monday)~~ Nov 30 (Wednesday), hard deadline
Lab 7 (109 points), due Dec 12 (Monday)

Course Essentials

Syllabus
Lab 0 (due Thursday Sep 8, 11:59pm)
Academic Honesty Policies
Lab Workflow

Course Schedule

Note: schedule for upcoming lectures are subject to change.

Lecture 1: Tuesday Sep 6

Course overview slides and lecture notes

Course overview, administrivia, and logistics
Introduction to command line

Lecture 2: Thursday Sep 8

Lecture notes

Review UNIX commands
Reading man pages
Version control with Git

Recitation 1: Weekend of Sep 9

Getting Started in the UNIX Programming Environment
Comparison of command-line text editors
Git and Lab Workflow for Lab 1

Lecture 3: Tuesday Sep 13

Lecture notes

printf() debugging in C
Makefiles
Separate compilation

You can obtain a sample project built using Make on CLAC by running:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/myadd

Reading: K&R chapter 1

Lecture 4: Thursday Sep 15

Lecture notes

Storage classes and sizeof
Bits and binary

Reading: K&R chapters 2, 3, 4

Recitation 2: Weekend of Sep 16

Recitation notes

Review: Git, Make, C preprocessor, and header files

Lecture 5: Tuesday Sep 20

Lecture notes

Pointers and addresses
Stack allocation
Global variables and static allocation

Reading: K&R chapter 5

Lecture 6: Thursday Sep 22

Lecture notes

Heap allocation
malloc() and free()
Memory safety

Reading: K&R chapter 5

Recitation 3: Weekend of Sep 23

Recitation notes

Using bit operations
Understanding evaluation order
Debugging memory leaks and errors with Valgrind

Lecture 7: Tuesday Sep 27

Lecture notes

Pointer arithmetic
Arrays
Null-terminated arrays and strings

Reading: K&R chapter 5

Lecture 8: Thursday Sep 29

Lecture notes

Pointers to pointers
Structs
Function pointers

You can obtain sample code for a linked list of integers from CLAC:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/int-list

Reading: K&R chapter 6

Recitation 4: Weekend of Sep 30

Recitation notes

Address space layout
String and array operations

Midterm 1 Review: Tuesday Oct 4

Midterm 1: Thursday Oct 6

Recitation 5: Weekend of Oct 7

Recitation notes

Objects and methods in C
(Pascal) strings as objects

Lecture 9: Tuesday Oct 11

Lecture notes

Libraries and archives
Standard I/O (see lecture note 10)

You can obtain sample code for a basic numbers library from CLAC:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/libnumbers

Lecture 10: Thursday Oct 13

Lecture notes

Standard I/O vs file I/O
FILE pointers and file streams
(Textual) output and buffering

Reading: K&R chapter 7

Recitation 6: Weekend of Oct 14

Recitation notes

Shell commands with pipes and redirection

Lecture 11: Tuesday Oct 18

Lecture notes

(Textual) input and blocking
EOF conditions
mdb demo

Reading: K&R chapter 7

You can obtain the demo code for output buffering from CLAC:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/output-buffering

You can obtain the source code for ncat from CLAC, in here:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/file-io-examples

Lecture 12: Thursday Oct 20

Lecture notes

File I/O with binary data
Endianness
File pointers vs file descriptors
Network stack

Reading: K&R chapter 8

Recitation 7: Weekend of Oct 21

Recitation notes

myhead
myarchive and myexpand

Lecture 13: Tuesday Oct 25

Lecture notes

TCP/IP networking
Client/server model
C sockets API

Reading:

Beej’s Guide to Network Programming
- Chapter 2: What is a socket?
- Chapter 3: IP addresses, structs, and Data Munging
- Chapter 5: System Calls or Bust

Examples:

tcp-echo: a TCP client and server exchange some text with one another using file descriptors:
```
git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/tcp-echo
```
tcp-ncat: implements the ncat (from file-io-examples) over a TCP connection using FILE pointers:
```
git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/tcp-ncat
```

Lecture 14: Thursday Oct 27

Lecture notes

TCP/IP demos
Application layer networking
HTTP demo

Reading:

HTTP Made Really Easy
- Read “Using HTTP 1.0”, minus “Other HTTP Methods” and “HTTP Proxies”

John’s CLAC homepage URL: http://clac.cs.columbia.edu/~j-hui/cs3157/

Recitation 8: Weekend of Oct 28

Recitation notes

TCP/IP networking in the shell using netcat

Lecture 15: Tuesday Nov 1

Lecture notes

HTTP/1.0
Dynamic web pages and multitier server architecture
UNIX permissions

You can find code for the sockaddr puzzle here:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/sockaddr-puzzle

Lecture 16: Thursday Nov 3

Lecture notes

Concurrency and process management
fork()

You can find examples demonstrating fork(), waitpid(), and exec() on CLAC, here:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/fork-exec-demos

Election Day Holiday: Tuesday Nov 8

Lecture 17: Thursday Nov 10

Lecture notes

waitpid()
exec()
Signals

You can find examples demonstrating sigaction() on CLAC, here:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/sigaction-demos

Recitation 9: Weekend of Nov 11

Recitation notes

TCP/IP networking with sockets

Midterm 2 Review: Tuesday Nov 15

Midterm 2: Thursday Nov 17

Recitation 10: Weekend of Nov 18

Recitation notes

Puzzle: Starfork
fork(), waitpid(), exec(), and signals

TA Chat: Tuesday Nov 22

Thanksgiving Holiday: Thursday Nov 24

Lecture 18: Tuesday Nov 29

Lecture notes

Demo: jsh
Memory allocation
Automatic memory management

You can find the code for the jsh demo on CLAC, here:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/cmdline

Lecture 19: Thursday Dec 1

Lecture notes

Demo: mdb-lookup-server and dynamic HTTP server
Compiler optimizations
Memory access latency
Performance and benchmarking

You can find the gtg-fast and list-vs-vector demos on CLAC, here:

git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/gtg-fast
git clone ~j-hui/cs3157-pub/examples/list-vs-vector

Recitation 11: Weekend of Dec 2

Recitation notes

Puzzle: Malgrind
Memory safety

Lecture 20: Tuesday Dec 6

Guest lecture: Andreas Kellas

Bugs, vulnerabilities, and exploits
Buffer overflows and return addresses
Modern computer security

Wrap-up: Thursday Dec 8

Epilogue slides

Final review
Course recap
Beyond 3157

Recitation 12: Weekend of Dec 9

Recitation notes

fork() + exec() puzzles

Additional Material

Cats:

FILE I/O
Strings
exec()

forkherd:

fork()
FILE I/O

Final exam: Tuesday Dec 20

4:20pm–6:20pm

Cumulative; topics covered:

Git, Make, and separate compilation
Bits, bytes, binary, and endianness
C types, expressions, statements, and functions
Pointers, arrays, structs, function pointers
Null bytes, NULL pointers, and null terminators
Heap allocation and memory safety in C
Standard file streams, file I/O with text vs binary data
Pipes and redirection in the shell
TCP/IP networking with netcat
TCP/IP networking with sockets and file streams
HTTP/1.0
UNIX process hierarchy and file permissions
fork(), waitpid(), and exec()