A.Y. 2018/2019 – Teacher: prof. Francesco Tommasi

Semester: first

Credits: 6

 

1) Course presentation and aim

 

The course aims at providing the students coming from the humanities with the basics of Computer Science. The course is based on the UNIX operating system, because of its popularity among professionals.

The following topics will be taught:

- What is an operating system

- The UNIX operating system

- The shell and the Command Line Interface

- Useful UNIX commands and utilities

- Scripting languages and their use

- Text encoding – Unicode, UTF8 and related tools

- File formats: description and manipulation (text, image, audio, video)

- Network basics and main network tools

- Computer security – digital objects integrity and authenticity

 

 

Reference material:

 

All needed reference material is composed, organized and constantly updated by the teacher. It will be posted in the course moodle site.

 

As a secondary reference, the following texts may be consulted:

 

- Peek, Todino, Strang, Learning the Unix Operating System, 5th ed. O'Reilly 2001, ISBN 978-0596002619:

- Newham, Learning the bash Shell, 3rd ed., O'Reilly 2005 ISBN 978-0596009656

- Cooper, Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

- Silberschatz, Galvin, Gagne - Operating System Concepts - Wiley - 9th ed. (2013) - ISBN 978-1118063330

 

2) Acquired skills

 

The student will be able to exploit the power of the command line interface to deal with basic computer problems. Such skills will prove useful in other courses (ex. database, web technologies) when he will be requested to install, run and manage relevant software for those fields.

 

3) Prerequisites

 

Familiarity with computers (at least at ECDL level)

 

4) Didactic method

 

While lectures are delivered, the students sit in front of a computer and are requested to reproduce every step as shown by the teacher.

 

5) Students evaluation

Students will be presented with a practical task and asked to solve it by the computer within a given time.

 

6) Meet the teacher

the teacher is always available. Just write to francesco.tommasi@unisalento.it for an appointment.