Prep

The CYF+ Immersive Engineering Programme is an intensive three month course. There’s a lot to get through and you’ll need to hit the ground running. To prepare for this exciting opportunity, you will:

Computers

TODO: Add background reading on how computers work.

Linux

• Play the Bandit - you must be able to complete up to level 20 (repeatedly)
• Take this Unix 101 course (and then try 102)
• Print out this Linux-Cheat-Sheet

Go

• Learn the basics of the Go programming language: Get Started - The Go Programming Language
• Read this, you might find it useful for working through your first projects: How to use the fmt package in Golang
• And optionally Learn Go with tests
• Read the Pointers chapter of An Introduction to Programming in Go, and do the problems listed in the chapter.
• Read about stack and heap memory - note that the examples here are C++ not Go, but you should be able to follow them. One important difference between these languages is that in Go, you don’t need to worry about whether a value lives on the heap or the stack (in fact, Go is allowed to choose where your variable lives, and even move it around) - this means that it’s ok to return a pointer to a stack variable in Go. You also don’t need to call delete yourself in Go - Go is a garbage collected language so it will delete variables when they’re no longer needed.

Tooling

• Set up and get to know your IDE
• Learnt how to navigate Go documentation

Projects

Complete the prep and first five projects from the Immersive Go course

• Prep
• Output and Error Handling
• CLI Files
• File Parsing
• TODO: Add a link to the threads project
• Servers & HTTP Requests

Reading

Dip in to some longer books, but don’t feel you need to read the whole lot!

• Google - Site Reliability Engineering
• The Unix Tools Philosophy
• The Phoenix Project