We will use Piazza for all communications and online discussions. Everyone on the class roster has already been registered using the preferred email address you provided when you regitered. If you have not already done so, please respond to the confirmation email to join the CS5500 Piazza group. The instructor and TAs will use this group to send you information about the course throughout the semester. If you did not receive an invitation, please contact the instructor or a TA as soon as possible.

If you have questions about the course material, please post to Piazza rather than sending email messages to course staff. One of your classmates may be able to offer suggestions. You can post annonymously if you wish. Only the course staff will know your identity. Also feel free to answer a classmate's question. We are a community and we help each other.

You can post privately to just the course staff for administrative or other tcourse-related issues. This ensures that one of the instructor or a TA gets back to you as soon as possible.

For this class you will need to have a valid Khoury College account. If you do not already have one, please visit Khoury Account Creation and follow the instructions there to create your Khoury account.

Your Khoury account will provide you access to all student-available Khoury College resources, including its GitHub server that will be used for this class. See the Khoury Howto pages for information on how to access your Khoury email, create personal web pages, and the other resources available to you from the school.

We will use the Khoury College's Enterprise GitHub server throughout the course to distribute programming examples, and to distribute and submit homework assignments, quizzes, and your class project. Once you have a Khoury College account, use your account name and password to login to the Khoury Enterprise GitHub Server to activate your GitHub account.

Once you have verified that you can log in to the Khoury College Enterprise GitHub server, please post a private note to the course staff on Piazza with the summary "Khoury Account". In the note, include your

• Name
• NEU ID
• Khoury College / GitHub account name

This will enable the course staff to provide accesss to your homework, quiz, and class project repositories. You will not be able to participate in class activities until you do this, so please complete this step as soon as possible.

You can interact with the GitHub server through its web-based user interface, and through the Git command line interface. We will cover the basic of using GitHub and the Git command line interface in class. There are also a number of online GitHub tutorials, including:

• GitHub Hellow World from GitHub.
• Mastering GitHub from Code School (free account registration required).

Integrated Development Environment

You should ensure that you have compilers and integrated development environments (IDEs) installed that you will use during this course. Two of the homework assignments ask you to create Java programs, so you will need a recent version of Java and an IDE such as Eclipse or IntelliJ. Eclipse is available at no charge from the Eclipse Software Foundation. IntelliJ and all other JetBrains development tools are available at no cost to students. Visit the For Students page for information and to register.

Git source code management system

We will use the Git together with GitHub to manaage source code repositories and share code among team members. Follow the steps in this document to install and configure Git

MacOS

A compiler and other development tools including Git are available with the optional Xcode command line tools available at no cost from Apple. Before downloading them, try running this command from the Terminal application: ‘gcc -v’. If you are prompted to download the command line tools at that point, follow the instructions. If the response is ‘gcc: command not found’ then install the XCode command line tools from the Apple Developer website.

You will need a free Apple ID to login; create an Apple ID if you do not already have one. Now select the latest non-beta version of the Xcode command line tools to install. An installation DMG package will be downloaded. Double click on the downloaded package to begin installation. Verify your installation by re-executing the command “gcc -v” and observing the displayed information.

Microsoft Windows 10

The easiest way to install Git is from the Git for Windows website. Git for Windows offers a lightweight native set of tools that bring the full feature set of the Git source code management system to Windows, while providing appropriate user interfaces for experienced Git users and novices. Git for Windows includes the following:

• Git Bash emulation to run Git from a command line
• Git GUI, a graphical version of just about every Git command line function, as well as visual dif tools
• Shell Integration by right-clicking on a folder in Windows Explorer to access the BASH or GUI.

Linux

Git is pre-installed on most versions of Linux that include a compiler and development tools. It can also be installed from the Debian based systems (e.g. Ubuntu):

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install git

or from Red Hat based systems:

sudo yum upgrade
sudo yum install git