CIS 520: Introduction to Operating Systems
Educational Objectives and Approach to Learning
Dr. Daniel Andresen, 11/29/99
The objectives of this course are:
- to learn fundamental operating system concepts for centralized and distributed operating systems. These concepts include
- process and thread management,
- memory management,
- file systems,
- interprocess and network communication, and
- process synchronization.
- to give students the opportunity to practice these skills on real-world types of applications which they can be expected to program in research, education, business, and industry environments.
The approach to learning in this class is:
- a traditional lecture with all lecture notes and projects available to the students on "the web" and accessible through a browser
- challenging group programming assignments which promote "active learning" to reinforce and amplify the lecture material. These assignments will include significant modifications to an actual, working operating system to familiarize students with the internals of OS implementation.
The success of meeting these objectives will be assessed through:
- exams covering the course material
- grades on the team programming projects
- individual interviews to discuss the team projects
- in-class interaction, including quizzes and questions during lecture
Prior to entering this class, students are expected to be:
- familiar with basic concepts such as stacks, searching, trees, queues, hash tables, recursion, and arrays
- experienced with the C programming language, including header files, the preprocessor, pointers, arrays, structures, and memory management
- experienced with object-oriented program design and the Java programming language, including the concepts of threads, data hiding, and interfaces
- familiar with how the computer hardware is structured, including the memory hierarchy, basic I/O interfaces, interrupts, the purpose of the CPU