Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (CS 313)

Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective

About This Course

Welcome to this online video course on Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, designed to demystify exactly what happens "under the hood" when your programs run. While traditional computer systems courses focus primarily on how to build hardware or design operating systems, this course takes a unique, application-driven approach. Written entirely from a programmer's perspective, we explore how your software interacts with the compiler, the operating system, and the physical hardware. By understanding the underlying mechanics of execution, representation, and communication, you will gain the power to write code that is significantly faster, more reliable, and inherently secure.

What You Will Learn

Through structured video lectures and practical, hands-on insights, you will master the foundational layers of modern computer systems. Key topics include:

• Data Representation & Arithmetic: Learn how computers represent integers, signed/unsigned values, and floating-point numbers at the bit level, and how to avoid critical mathematical overflow bugs.
• Machine-Level Representation (x86-64): Master the art of reading compiler-generated assembly code, understanding control structures, and identifying security vulnerabilities like buffer overflows.
• Program Optimization: Discover how to tune your code to exploit instruction-level parallelism, leverage out-of-order processors, and eliminate performance bottlenecks.
• The Memory Hierarchy: Deeply understand L1, L2, and L3 caches, and learn to write highly efficient, cache-friendly programs by maximizing spatial and temporal locality.
• Linking and Loading: Understand symbol resolution, static and dynamic linking, relocatable object files, and how to resolve frustrating link-time errors.
• Exceptional Control Flow: Explore how the operating system manages processes, context switching, multitasking, system calls, and signals.
• Virtual Memory: Master address translation, memory protection, and the mechanics of manual memory allocators (like malloc and free).
• Network & Concurrent Programming: Learn the socket interface and how to build concurrent applications, such as a functional web server, using processes, threads, and semaphores.

Why Take This Course?

In modern software development, relying solely on high-level abstractions is no longer enough to build cutting-edge applications. This course will elevate you into a rare power programmer who truly understands how computers execute code. You will acquire the systemic intuition needed to diagnose mysterious runtime bugs, close dangerous security gaps, and optimize programs for peak hardware efficiency. Ultimately, this course serves as an essential bridge, giving you the confidence to dive into advanced fields like compilers, computer architecture, cybersecurity, and operating systems.

Who Should Take This Course?

This course is designed for computer science and computer engineering students, self-taught developers, and software professionals looking to deepen their systems knowledge.

• Prerequisites: You should have basic programming familiarity. Experience with C or C++ is highly recommended, as we interact directly with pointers and manual memory management. If your background is in a high-level language like Java or Python, this course will perfectly bridge the gap to low-level execution.