Expectations for CMSC414

The following is material we expect you to know beforehand. Make sure you review these topics as needed before the semester begins.

C (this is used heavily)

• How to write a program
• Memory model (heap, stack, malloc, free, etc.)
• Arrays, pointers, pointer arithmetic
• Command-line arguments (argc, argv)
• functions and structures
• #include
• Storing ASCII strings in C
• Representation in memory (null-terminator)
• String creation and manipulation
• Basic string functions (strlen, strcmp, etc.)
• Storing binary data in C
• Representation in memory (the need for both a char*/void* and a separate length variable)
• Creating and manipulating data
• Basic data functions (memcmp, memcpy)
• Difference with strings (why strlen() doesn't apply here)
• How to compile from the command line (including using make)
• Writing a Makefile
• How to run a program from the command line

gdb

• How to run a program in gdb
• Setting breakpoints
• Inspecting variables, memory addresses

x86 assembly

• Registers
• Basic operations (eg. add, sub, mul, xor, jmp, jne, ret, push, nop)

Posix shell (eg. bash)

• Viewing directories and files
• Changing directories
• Copying, moving, and renaming files
• Running commands

numbers

• binary, octal, decimal, and hexadecimal
• converting between representations
• difference between representations and in-memory storage
• byte ordering
• powers of 2 up to at least 10
• standard prefixes in powers of 2 and 10
• bits per hex digit, byte, int32, int64, address
• modular arithmetic
• bit operations (and, or, xor, not)