Colony

General¶

• Where can I learn more about programming in C?
  • The standard C reference book is called "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie (also known as the K&R book)
    • There's copy of this in the club room on the book shelf
  • Jason Knichel made a very good C presentation. Look in /trunk/pub/presentation/ for it
• Where can I learn about how computers work?
  • A good textbook (its the textbook for 15-213) that will teach you about how computers work is called "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective"
    • If you do not know how to program, or do not know C, some parts of this book may be a little hard to understand.

Hardware¶

• Sharp Infrared Rangefinders
  • Read the hardware documentation section on them: Rangefinders

Linux¶

• Viewing what directory you are in: %pwd
• viewing what is in your current directory
  • just see the names of non-hidden files: %ls
  • See all files (including hidden files): %ls -a
  • see information about files like the file permissions: %ls -l
• change directories
  • go up one directory: %cd ..
  • go into a directory (replace <directory> with the name of the directory you want to go into): %cd <directory>
• simple text editors: pico or nano
• more complex and a lot more powerful text editors: emacs, xemacs, vi, vim
• standard C compiler: gcc
• standard C++ compiler: g++
• search for text in a file: grep
• Many things on linux have something thats called a "man page" that is a sort of manual for that thing. To access the man page for a program foo type: %man foo
  • man pages are very useful for finding out information about what command line arguments programs take or how to use some of the standard C functions