Academic Computing Services has scheduled the following short courses for early next month. All of these courses, which are open to the Rensselaer community and given free-of-charge, will be held in JEC 3207. Also please remember that you must register for each course you wish to attend.
This course provides an introduction to the UNIX operating system as it is used on the RCS system; most of the material also applies to Linux. It introduces several common UNIX commands, some of which have to do with managing and printing files. You will also learn about output redirection, pipes, and filename wildcards. Finally, the course will explain the directory structure and path names, including some commands for manipulating directories and for controlling directory permissions.
Brief exercises are interspersed between topics for hands-on practice.
This course provides a basis for other short courses, including emacs and vi.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with RCS and UNIX
This course introduces the emacs text editor, a standard file editor on RCS and many other UNIX systems. On RCS UNIX workstations, emacs provides a graphical interface with menus. This editor is slower to start up, but has more functionality than vi, including special features to simplify writing source code in several programming languages, including C and TeX/LaTeX.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with RCS and UNIX
This course introduces the vi text editor, a file editor available on all UNIX systems. On RCS UNIX workstations, vi is a full-screen editor that starts up quickly and has adequate functionality for many text editing tasks, such as composing source code and mail messages. vi uses no menus; you use keystrokes to enter commands.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with RCS and UNIX
Are you writing a thesis or book, or perhaps an article for a technical journal? Is your document a lengthy one, or does it contain a lot of equations, figures and tables, and cross references, and maybe even a bibliography? If so, consider using LaTeX.
LaTeX is a document preparation system based on the TeX language, which was designed especially for formatting mathematical and scientific text. Unlike Word, LaTeX is not a WYSIWYG program; instead, it uses text markup that looks similar to HTML. LaTeX also offers a number of important benefits in that it handles long, complex documents with ease, doesn't crash, never corrupts your files, is not susceptible to viruses, is available for just about any computer platform, and produces output of the highest quality (particularly equations).
And if you're writing a thesis, a local "thesis" template that meets the requirements of the Rensselaer Graduate School is also available.
Although this course will be taught on UNIX workstations, LaTeX is also used world-wide on both Windows PCs and Macs, and the language is the same on all platforms. So, what you learn in this course will apply on whatever computing system you use, as well as give you a foundation to continue working with LaTeX.
Prerequisites: Working knowledge of a UNIX text editor, such as emacs or vi.
Enrollment for ACS' short courses is limited to 30 persons, so please be sure to sign up early. And if you find that you are unable to attend a class for which you have registered, please allow someone else to take your spot by sending electronic mail to acs-courses@rpi.edu. If a course needs to be cancelled or rescheduled, you will receive notification via e-mail.
If you would like to register for any of these short courses, you may do so on-line by first selecting the Academic Computing Services link from the main RPInfo homepage, selecting the Computing short courses link from the resulting ACS homepage, and finally selecting the On-line registration link. Please check to make sure that you have the necessary course prerequisites before registering for a class.
If you have questions about any of these short courses, you can contact the VCC Help Desk by phoning extension 7777, or by directing electronic mail to consult@rpi.edu.
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