Stanford Course Logistics

1) This site will serve as the home for CS1U. Everything should be posted here. I will communicate some course announcements by e-mail, so make sure you've enrolled in the course or talked to me about adding you to the list to get course announcements.

2) Course Format: people are coming at this material from lots of different places. Some have no Unix experience; some have implemented primitive Unix-like operating systems. Thus, we chose to offer this course with a video format. The lectures will be entirely on video in short chunks so that, for instance, people who already know everything about grep don't have to watch the grep videos (for other educational benefits of a video format, ask to chat with me!). Each video will have exercises to go along with it to solidify the material. For each week, watch the videos under the 'Video Schedule' tab, and then complete the lab in the corresponding 'Week X' tab. When you are done, submit your solutions on the respective Canvas assignment to receive credit for the week

3) Lab Structure: We will have labs weeks 2-7. The first week of labs will be focused on the intro videos. This means that at lab most folks will be installing a virtual machine and setting up Linux on it, then playing around with the basics of their shell and text editor (if you're already set up, then you can continue customizing your shell and text editor configuration!). After the first week, the challenges will be fun competitions that leverage and go beyond the videos for a given week.

4) Course Logistics: This course is six weeks long, beginning week 2 and ending after week 7. Each week, there are a set of videos and lab exercises. Exercises must be completed and submitted via Canvas quiz at the end of the following week. For example, week 2's exercises are due Sunday, 11:59 PM PDT of week 3. Each quiz is graded on completion, not correctness. Any good faith efforts will receive full credit.

This is a one unit class, so we don't want to add too much to your workload. However, in past quarters we let students submit answers to the quizzes any time in the quarter. Students often pushed the labs off until the very end of the quarter, and it resulted in a lot of stress all around. To mitigate this, we have decided to add due dates for the labs. We will be allowing five days throughout the quarter, used in any way you please. If you need late days beyond that, email [email protected] ASAP, and we can work something out. We are very flexible, if you give us enough notice!

Some weeks have no deliverables, ie they require local setup on your computer. In this case, you can submit one or two sentences on Canvas describing what you did and acknowledging that you completed the exercises (honor code that you actually completed them).

5) Linux Reference: if Google doesn't cut it for you, the library has a subscription to Safari Books Online, which means that you can access all of the O'Reili tech books for free. There are books on specific topics like Git, and there are also general Linux references.

6) Questions and Office Hours: If you have questions as you complete the exercises, you can post on Piazza or attend our virtual office hours. Times and Zoom Links are posted on Canvas for privacy and security reasons.

Piazza Signup Link: piazza.com/stanford/spring2021/cs1u_spring

If your question is personal or otherwise contains information that shouldn't be publicly heard, send an email to Sofia and Erin at [email protected].

7) Honor Code: You are expected to truthfully represent your course participation and submit work that is your own. While you can work with friends (remotely), we expect everyone to submit their own individual lab exercises.