Day-0

Getting started!

Well, I'm not gonna lie to you but I do know basic programming and enough to get anything I want to get done quickly. I was a student at UCSC majored in CS, switched to CE, graduated with EE.
My CS skills is very rusty.

To get started, I charted out all the courses which will be useful to sharpen one's knowledge. In case you are completely new, then these courses will mold you into a CS ninja. Basic skills are: programming language, data structure, UNIX/Linux commands, algorithms, operating system, compiler.

There is a mystical CS ninja god at UCSC that can basically transform you to a CS ninja given if you are willing to practice and read all his assignments. So the first things I did was to grab all these awesome exercises and training drills. Of course my memory isn't so bad so I execute this awesome move:

cd {some_secret_path}
for i in `ls |grep -wm`                 //He signed his name as wm, a.k.a wicked master!
do
tar czf ~/${i}.tar.gz $i
end

Then "scp ~/*.tar.gz ninja@somewhere.com:" to steal all the good stuff.

This basically zip all the training modules from him and take them home.

Here they are:

-rw-r--r--. 1 xpuser users 55473584 Oct 26 04:13 cmps005j-wm.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xpuser users  3322508 Oct 26 04:13 cmps012a-wm.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xpuser users 37464116 Oct 26 04:13 cmps012b-wm.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xpuser users       45 Oct 26 04:13 cmps060g-wm.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xpuser users 41474100 Oct 26 04:13 cmps104a-wm.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xpuser users 10544936 Oct 26 04:13 cmps104b-wm.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xpuser users   869352 Oct 26 04:13 cmps105-wm.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xpuser users 12776266 Oct 26 04:14 cmps109-wm.tar.gz

Disclaimer: I do not have any copyright nor permission on any of those files. If you're  from UCSC, please let it pass by and share with the world just like other Open Courses.


Second step is to setup your dojo for martial arts of interested in. In this case, it's Java so we need to grab those from the Oracle! My dojo is Ubuntu x64, your might be different so grab whatever works. There is also a training manual at:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/index.html

Another useful addition to your dojo is GitHub which ninja knows you're in training and linking your dojo to theirs.

Next  is to unleash the magical. I am not completely a noojia, so I start with a cmps012a belt.

tar zxf cmps012a-wm.tar.gz.

In Windows you would need Winrar or similar tool.

Depending on the dojo that you have, it may comes with an awesome text editor like `vi' or `emacs'. Other dojo can also get these text editors. If you're used to notepad, please get a better one like notepad++  or ultraedit. `vi' for Windows machines is `gvim'. No you can not use Microsoft Words!


In summary:
1) Chart out courses
2) Grab a Java compiler + a text editor
3) Setup GitHub

Let's roll!

Hello World

Hello World Wide Web!
This blog is an attempt to capture and log me learning activities in
computer science. I'm going to start from the very basic class and
hopefully progress to later ones before X-mas. My background is
electrical engineering... well I know a little programming and stuff but
I haven't touch for such a long time and now I feel it's completely new.
I have no knowledge of Java. My last memory of a data structure is a
link-list or array. So basically at this moment I have the knowledge of
less than an equivalent of a high school student whom studied AP CS
courses.