Syllabus

Software Carpentry

• course outline
• acknowledgments

Introduction

• motivation for course
• need to improve quality as well as efficiency
• key idea
• target audience
• self-test
• course philosophy
• topics
• what you will need
• recommended reading
• typographic conventions

Version Control

• motivation for this lecture
• version control systems
• CVS and Subversion
• basic operations
• command line and GUI clients
• merging conflicts
• versioning
• binary files
• rollback
• getting started
• Subversion command reference
• reading Subversion output
• branching and merging

Shell Basics

• motivation for this lecture
• difference between shell and operating system
• the file system
• basic commands
• creating files and directories
• wildcards

More Shell

• input, output, and redirection
• pipes
• environment variables
• the PATH variable
• basic tools
• Unix ownership and permission
• Windows ownership and permission
• some more advanced tools

Basic Scripting

• introducing Python
• interactive use
• batch use
• variables
• printing and quoting
• numbers
• Booleans
• comparisons
• conditionals
• while, break, and continue

Strings, Lists, and Files

• strings
• indexing
• string methods
• lists
• list methods
• for and range
• testing for membership
• aliasing
• tuples
• file I/O

Functions, Libraries, and the File System

• defining functions
• variable scope
• aliasing
• default parameter values
• variable-length argument lists
• functions as objects
• creating modules
• math library
• system library
• representing and manipulating times
• file system programming
• The os.path Module
• The __main__ Keyword
• Python sources

Testing Basics

• motivation
• terminology
• rules for tests
• testing frameworks
• choosing tests

Dictionaries and Error Handling

• motivation
• string formatting
• dictionaries
• working with dictionaries
• dictionary methods
• counting and inverting
• dictionary string formatting
• try, except, and else
• exceptions
• exception handler stack
• raising exceptions
• assertions and defensive programming
• executing subprocesses

Debugging

• what's wrong with print statements
• symbolic debuggers
• running in a debugger
• breakpoints, inspection, and single-stepping
• how debuggers work
• advanced operations
• rule 0

Object-Oriented Programming

• motivation
• defining classes
• defining methods
• defining classes
• special methods
• inheritance
• polymorphism
• Liskov substitution principle
• class members
• operator overloading

Structured Unit Testing

• mechanics
• example
• setup and teardown
• testing assertions
• testing I/O
• testing classes
• test-driven development

Automated Builds

• motivation for this lecture
• overview of Make
• basic features
• handling multiple targets
• defining phony targets
• automatic variables
• pattern rules
• specifying dependencies
• defining variables

Coding Style and Reading Code

• why read code
• cognition
• determining functionality
• naming
• idioms
• style-checking tools
• role of documentation
• traceability
• defensive programming and other pseudo-documentation
• active reading

Watching Programs Run

• Python's object model
• dynamic programming
• coverage
• profiling

Regular Expressions

• basic patterns
• anchors
• escape sequences
• extracting matches
• compiled REs
• other languages
• other patterns

Basic XML and XHTML

• formatting rules
• XHTML
• attributes
• images and links
• accessibility
• DOM
• basic features of DOM
• creating a DOM tree
• walking a DOM tree
• modifying a DOM tree

A Mini-Project

• checking for tabs
• automation
• checking for printable characters
• checking glossary entries
• checking cross-references

Client-Side Web Programming

• underlying protocols
• HTTP
• HTTP request
• HTTP response
• urllib
• parameterizing requests
• encoding and decoding
• web services

CGI

• overview
• MIME types
• example
• creating forms
• handling form data
• server-side state
• concurrency
• cookies

Binary Data

• motivation
• representing numbers
• bitwise operators
• shifting
• floating point numbers
• binary I/O
• packing data structures
• variable-length data
• metadata

Relational Databases

• create, insert, and drop
• simple queries
• joins
• negation and nested queries
• aggregation
• application programming
• handling NULL
• concurrency

Security

• goals
• limitations of technical solution
• terminology
• input is untrustworthy
• the evils of exec
• basic cryptography
• basic cryptography
• HTTPS
• ssh
• guidelines

Teamware

• overview of Trac
• repository browser and timeline
• issue tracker
• writing useful tickets
• mailing lists
• wiki
• roadmap and milestones
• dashboard
• weblogs
• administration

Extreme Programming

• Extreme Programming
• XP core practices
• planning game
• pair programming
• project velocity
• counter-arguments

The ICONIX Process

• use cases
• domain model
• robustness diagrams
• class diagrams
• sequence diagrams
• order of operations
• UML tools

The Nevex Process

• vision statement
• analysis & estimation
• A&E format
• design, implementation, and maintenance
• QA and documentation
• post mortem

Backward, Forward, and Sideways

• intro
• the Numeric module
• Python Imaging Library
• SCons
• integrating C into Python
• SWIG, Fortran, and embedding Python in C
• design patterns
• refactoring
• non-technical reading
• rules of programming