CST334 Week 1

First week of operating systems. I am very excited for this course as I really enjoy taking a look under the hood and figuring out how and why things work the way they do.

This first week we learned a brief history over the development of the first operating systems, which were initially created to manage resources efficiently. Additionally, we learned about the roots of the most popular modern day operating systems and how the development of the unix family tree of OS's developed from a belief in open source freedom.

After the lesson in OS history was the opportunity to be reintroduced to C. While I've worked with it before, this lecture was great for brushing up on how C differs from many higher level languages were use to using. Additionally, we went over the basics of command line/power shell and while I am use to navigating a computer using power shell I was introduced to a few flags and commands I have not used before.

After which, I also brushed up on binary and hexadecimal conversions as well as bit to byte conversions. These are familiar topics, but it is always good to practice and reinforcing knowledge.

Finally the lab and the coding assignment were a great chance to touch up on my C skills while also familiarizing myself with DOCKER and the gdb debugger. The debugger lab was all very new to mean and gave a great opportunity to see how memory is used while a program is being executed step by step. The coding assignment itself wasn't too difficult other than having to catch myself on simple mistakes involving memory allocation, but this is something I will have to get more familiar with as we continue to use C.

All in all, week 1 felt packed with great lessons and skills to hone.