Introduction to Tools and Techniques in Computer Science

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Welcome to Introduction to Tools and Techniques in Computer Science. This is an introductory lab-based course.

Every Computer Scientist needs to make use of an expansive set of modern computing tools and techniques. This course provides a hands-on experiential introduction to working with the tools and techniques we use every day to design, develop, analyze, and maintain software.

Building the book

This book was originally written with Pandoc’s Markdown in mind. A tool that can use Pandoc to render something like a book is Rippledoc. We’re using a fork of Rippledoc that uses Pandoc to get metadata instead of blindly trying to use the first line as the title.

The repository is hosted on Github and is open for contributions.

Here’s the strategy for building this book:

1. Switch to the main branch from whatever branch you’re currently on.

2. Make changes to the Markdown files you want to make changes to.

3. Commit your changes and optionally push them to remote.

4. Switch to the book branch, and merge main into book:

   git merge main

5. Run the rippledoc.py to regenerate HTML sources. These .html files are committed to the book branch - which is usually an anti-pattern since generally we wouldn’t commit something we can generate, but is required for the Github Pages to work. This has some interesting side-effects, such as having different .gitignore files for the two branches: main disallows .html files, and book allows them!

6. Commit the changes and push to remote to redeploy.