Readings

• Aside from the textbook, all readings and multimedia resources used for the course will be available on computers. Students who sign the appropriate forms (indicating their willingness to follow the Rules of Acceptable Use) will receive accounts on a SPARC 10 Model 40 (video.cs.vt.edu) in McB 110. Extensive use will be made of Macintosh systems in the lab, which is open evenings and weekends too.
• Once the textbook is obtained from the University Bookstore or the Tech Bookstore, a student will be able to read those chapters listed in the syllabus.
• Other course readings will be available in several ways. Many are on reserve in the library.
• As a result of Project Envision, many important ACM and IEEE-CS articles are available in page image form (CCITT Group IV facsimile format). Probably the best way to read these papers online is with the Dienst system (which is used in the NCSTRL project). Also, either the xv or xtiff programs can be used to read articles, but xprcedit is better. The files are all stored on video.cs.vt.edu in /u4/pages/acm/cacm and can be located given the volume and issue numbers as well as a short key for each article. Each article is stored in a separate subdirectory, containing a separate file for each page. Thus, in /u4/pages/acm/cacm/v34/n10/SAMU91a will be six Group IV tiff files: 0000.tif for the first page, 0001.tif for the second page, etc.
• Online copies of documentation for software packages used will be available in several forms. There will be Macintosh tutorials, standard UNIX-style man pages, PostScript or PDFfiles, and simple ASCII files.