CSc 372 Resources

Below are some resources that you may find useful and/or interesting.

If there are on-line items that you recommend, let me know and I'll add links for them.

ML and Functional Programming

• www.smlnj.org is the Standard ML of New Jersey home page.
• Man pages for the SML Basis Library. Here's where you can find out what's in the various structures, such as String, List, and Char.
• This comparison of ray tracer implementations in C++ and SML is pretty cool. It's interesting to note that the SML version, when compiled with a good SML compiler, runs faster than the C++ version compiled with g++.
• There are various compilations of examples of functional programming being used in "real world" applications. One of the better ones is Functional Programming in the Real World by Philip Wadler.
• A good second book on ML is ML for the Working Programmer. Two other ML books I like, although more introductory, are Programming with Standard ML and Functional Programming Using Standard ML.
• I think Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming is a great book on both Haskell and functional programming.
• Running SML/NJ

• The Ruby Home Page
• Ruby-Doc.org
• The first edition of Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (our text) is free on the web but seems to be only available in HTML. Let me know if you find a PDF that's free.
• The(?) Ruby FAQ
• A copy of chapter 22 of the text is on E-Reserve at the library. The reserves page password was posted to the mailing list on 9/25.
• A pretty good quick reference page
• Along with the text, another Ruby book I like is Ruby Cookbook.
• There's a little coverage in the text on the Ruby debugger. Here's some additional material:
  • Ruby Debugging by Doug Beaver
  • Debugging Ruby programs 101, at IBM developerWorks. (Requires membership, but it's free.)

• SWI-Prolog Home Page

• SWI-Prolog Reference Manual as a PDF (HTML)

• A few years back the Prolog text used in 372 was Adventure in Prolog. You can now read it on-line.

  Another interesting thing at the same site is the Active Prolog Tutor. This is apparently an old DOS-based program. To run it it seems to be sufficient to unload this file, aptfiles.zip, and run apt.exe in the resulting aptfiles directory. I checked it with my virus checker (AVG) and it was clean but you should check it with yours, too.

• A copy of chapter 8 of Prolog Programming in Depth is on E-Reserve at the library. The reserves page password was posted to the mailing list on 9/25.

• This Prolog Tutorial by John R. Fisher has lots of interesting stuff. I haven't had time to work through the whole thing but near the bottom of section 2.2 is a nice animation of a factorial computation in Prolog. Watch carefully how the logical variables are instantiated as the various calls to factorial complete.

• Here's an interesting survey of syntactic elements across a number of languages. There's an interesting collection of stuff in the parent directory, too.
• A number of Alan Perlis' Epigrams in Programming relate to programming languages but my favorite is perhaps #19. See what yours is.

If you're new to UNIX/Linux, keep in mind that Poorna and I will be happy to show you what need to know and provide on-going assistance as well.

In terms of written matter, you might find my UNIX slides from CSc 352 useful.

Googling for /unix tutorial/ and /unix "quick reference"/ turns up lots of good stuff. Here are some things that I like:

• www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix
• http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~kevin/unix-tutorial
• Norm Matloff's Unix--the Bare Minimum is just about what he claims.
• The University of Washington has a good quick reference.
• Here's a quick reference from UCB.

• Here is my set of Emacs slides from CSc 352.

• A reference card for GNU Emacs.

• The Emacs FAQ.

• I often refer to Learning the bash Shell by Newham and Rosenblatt. I see it from time to time in the local bookstores.

• www.faqs.org has a variety of shell-related FAQs. One of the items there, Csh Programming Considered Harmful presents some good reasons why the C Shell is usually a bad choice for any sort of serious scripting. (Of course, I think that serious scripting is often a bad choice in itself. Use a real language!)

• I like Mendel Cooper's Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide. It does have many "forward references", which I think make it difficult to use as a text, but for finding more detail on a topic, it's pretty good.

• The bash home page.

• Notes on turnin