University of Washington CSE added a practical course to get students familiar with Linux and C partly because students are expected mostly to come through other departments / disciplines where the only programming may have come from Java or Python. Students were having great difficulty in higher courses like graphics, OS, compilers, and embedded systems because we weren’t teaching programming courses in our curriculum except maybe our programming languages course itself which covers languages like ML, Scheme, Haskell, or Eiffel and OOP languages like Smalltalk.
Early pilots of the course were put together with a set of Linux guides including bash scripts and Makefiles, source control with svn (hopefully hit by now), and moved quickly into practical stuff with bison / yacc to parse complex files and work with GCC output. I never got to see how well it was received by students but I was glad to see students go through the time-honored traditions of learning CLI tools.
Early pilots of the course were put together with a set of Linux guides including bash scripts and Makefiles, source control with svn (hopefully hit by now), and moved quickly into practical stuff with bison / yacc to parse complex files and work with GCC output. I never got to see how well it was received by students but I was glad to see students go through the time-honored traditions of learning CLI tools.