First Assignment

Right now, I'm not expecting you to have any prior knowledge. If you do, some of the stuff here might be a bit basic, but I guarantee even an expert can learn a bit from each section. If you're brand new to this stuff, expect to learn an incredible amount.

Your First Assignment

In this course I like to have students submit short written assignments. As I cannot grade all of the assignments for the free courses, they are really for you to use to self-assess your understanding.

If you want to check out the guided course, it is $50 dollars a month and in return, I grade all your assignments and you get exclusive access to me. I think it is a fair trade: Guided Fundamentals Course

I have a specific format that I want you to fill out for each assignment, which will force you to think through what you are doing.

First, there will be the questions I want you to answer. For example:

Questions: 1. What is an operating system? 
2. Describe what an operating system is responsible for.    
   * (This is a trick question, it's everything.) 
3. What is the world's most popular operating system? 
4. What are the top desktop operating systems? 


Resources: 1. The previous section 
2. Google

For each of the questions I ask, I expect you to answer them with a sentence or two that will be enough for you to understand what you meant in the future when you study them. Every time you write up an assignment, treat it like you are making study material for future you, or someone you are trying to teach.

Sometimes I will give you references, oftentimes I will make you Google for the resources yourself. Learning to pick out and use trusted resources is a major skill to learn. In this case, I gave you the resource.

Looking at Wikipedia, there is a ton of information there, and each sentence has linked resources. In order to understand what is going on, you might have to go one level deeper to feel like you have a grasp of your answers. Please, don't get too deep into the rabbit-hole, just learn enough that you can answer the question and move on. Despite the Wikipedia page having information on the history and formatting and more of man-pages, stick to what you need to answer these questions and move on.

Let's demo how I want you to try and do this going forward. Don't worry about things like plagiarism, though feel free to rewrite things however you want if it helps you understand better.

Finally, I want your unfiltered, raw feedback, telling me exactly how you feel about this section.

Feedback: Put it here and help me improve the material!

Final Format

To bring all of this together, the assignment you receive will look like this:

 Questions: 
1. What is an operating system? 
2. Describe what an operating system is responsible for.    
   * (This is a trick question, it's everything.) 
3. What is the world's most popular operating system? 
4. What are the top desktop operating systems? 

 Resources:  
* Previous Section

I expect you to answer with a .txt file that looks like this:

Answers:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Resources:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

Feedback:
Most of this material made sense (except for the kernel diagram) but I don't understand this weird format.
I sure hope you have some sort of master plan for this.

For your first assignment, submit the text of the answer I provided above (but make sure to fill in the answers!) Feel free to add any Pre-Questions or Post-Questions if you have any.

Note the feedback I gave myself. Despite this being meant to be straightforward, sections of it are too advanced for where we are right now, and that is perfectly okay. Make sure to give honest feedback about how you feel about the different assignments.

For the entirety of the course, please only submit .txt files. No .docx files, no .odt, no .pdfs please! This makes review easier for me when I do it.

On that note, I don't always get to read every answer because there are quite a few of you and only one me. Use the partner groups I had you make to submit your assignments and get feedback on them, They'll be able to help you with your pre and post-questions, as well as be supportive of what you are accomplishing!

First Assignment

First Assignment