Resources

This page has links to useful resources.

Practice problems and exams

Review materials for Exam 1:

• Exam 1 practice questions, Solutions
• Midterm, Spring 2020 (Questions 1–3), Solution
• Exam 1, Fall 2021, Solution

Review materials for Exam 2:

• Exam 2 practice questions, Solutions
• Midterm, Spring 2020 (Question 4), Solution
• Final exam, Spring 2020 (Questions 1–3), Solution
• Exam 2, Fall 2021, Solution

Review materials for Exam 3:

• Exam 3 practice questions, Solutions
• Final exam, Fall 2019 (Questions 4–5), Solution
• Final exam, Spring 2020 (Questions 4–5), Solution
• Exam 3, Fall 2021, Solution

x86-64 assembly language exercises

• Assembly language mini-exercises
• Assembly language exercise, solution
• Assembly language exercise 2 (more challenging)

x86-64 assembly programming resources

• CSF Assembly Language Tips & Tricks
  • This is a very comprehensive guide to x86-64 assembly language written by Max Hahn, focusing on issues that are important for CSF
• Brown x64 cheat sheet
• Brown gdb cheat sheet
• CMU summary of gdb commands for x86-64

Style Guidelines

• The style guidelines state our coding style expectations.

Software

This section covers the software you’ll be using in working on programming assignments.

Linux

For the programming assignments, you will need to use a recent x86-64 (64 bit) version of Linux.

Important: the code you submit is required to run correctly on Ubuntu 22.04, since that is the version of Linux that we use in Gradescope autograders.

Here are some options for getting your development environment set up.

You can use the CS ugrad machines to do your development work. The ugrad machines use a recent version of Fedora Linux. Correctly-written code will work the same way on Fedora and Ubuntu.

You can install Ubuntu 22.04 directly on your computer. This is a good option if you are comfortable installing operating systems from installation media.

On Windows 10, you can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Once WSL is enabled, you can install Ubuntu 22.04 from the Microsoft Store. Make sure that you install the tools listed below. Using WSL is an excellent option if you are comfortable doing your development work inside a terminal session.

Note that if you are using an Apple Silicon-based (ARM) Mac computer, then (as far as we know) there aren’t any good options for setting up a local development environment. Virtualization won’t work in the case because the computer doesn’t use an x86-64 CPU. However, using Visual Studio Code connected to an SSH workspace which accesses your ugrad account is a good option.

Valgrind

Code that relies on undefined behavior (such as expecting the value of an uninitialized variable to be 0) could very well behave differently on the autograder than it does when you run it on your development system. Make sure that you test your code using valgrind to make sure there are no memory errors.

Tools

Some of the tools you’ll want to have are:

• gcc
• g++
• make
• ruby
• valgrind
• git

All of these are available by default on the Ugrad computers.

To install on an Ubuntu-based system:

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make ruby valgrind git

You’ll also want to install a text editor. Emacs and Vim are good options:

sudo apt-get install emacs vim

Vim setup

Tutorial on setting up Vim

Using Git

Github ssh authentication: How to use ssh to access your private repositories on Github