Testimonials

These are letters I've gotten from former students over the years, which I think current and future students should read and learn from. Note especially how many times students say they wish they had paid more attention or worked harder.

I have never, by comparison, heard from a former student who said `I spent too much time doing homework and studying'. If you're a CS major, you have only a few years to get ready for a job which pays a lot because it's really really hard work. It's sort of like taking your Driver's Ed. class: once the class is over, and you're taking the driving test, you may wish you had made better use of your time as a student.

The only difference, of course, is that with a job in CS, the driving test never ever ends -- until you get fired for screwing up.

(All student testimonials are duplicated as they were sent to me, including spelling and grammar errors.)

Praise

From a student who took the course in the Spring of 2001:

This is just a short thank you note for the way you teach your Computer Lab Techniques class. I was in your class this past semester (spring 2001) and now I am interning at Lockheed Martins Advanced Technologies Lab (where Dr. Kay used to work). The first day when they walked me to my cubicle what was sitting on my desk? A sun workstation! My buddy asked me "Your familiar with UNIX right?" and happily i replied "Yes!" I know im no expert, and I dident do stellar in your class (not turning in half the homeworks and skipping the programming questions on the final dident help, i know its my own fault) but the hands on basics you taught in the class have helped me more than i would have ever thought. So I just wanted to tell my story and thank you for teaching CLT. Its the most useful class I have had so far.

From a student who took the course in the Spring of 2000:

Although I like to consider myself a 'Pico Pro', I thought I would let the upcoming Lab Techniques class know that my first job with Johnson & Johnson required me to program in Vi. I asked my boss if I could 'just use Pico', but he replied 'What the heck is Pico?'. The adjustment to Vi was not so bad. Besides, your future boss will be much happier knowing that you've had experience with Vi commands, so you don't accidentally 'dd' lines in an important shell script when you meant to 'r' a letter in a misspelled word. But as you repeatedly 'dd' 10 lines before realizing that what you're trying to do isn't working, you forget that 'shift Qq!' can get you out of this jam, but instead hit 'shift ZZ' on a script that you didn't make another copy of. Everything Lab Techniques teaches you, YOU NEED TO KNOW. So make it your A class- and thank Prof. Provine after. Thanks.

From a student who took the course in the Spring of 1997:

Hi Darren... I don't know if you remember me from your Unix class. I am finding a lot of use for the material covered in your class and found that your class was one of the only classes offered that was a taste of what the real world was like... good job.

From a student who took the course in the Spring of 1996:

Since I know Unix now, I got moved into a new job at work. I'm getting paid a lot more!

From a student who took the course in the Fall of 1995:

I remember sitting the back of the class when you were talking about RCS, and thinking "Why do I need to know this? I've never written any program longer than 50 lines!"

Guess what I'm doing now? I'm writing a web interface to RCS.

From a student who took Lab Tech in the Fall of 2007:

Subject: Thanks for grep/sed/sort!

I recently started an internship with CSC, and I thought you might be pleased to know that I am using sed, grep, and sort quite frequently. I've had to copy several files and change small strings in each file. The new strings were contained in other files that were saved in a different directory, so I had to search for the files that contained the strings I needed. Finally, I'm going through each of these files I've created and picking out all of the .C and .make files. If I hadn't taken your lab techniques class I would probably still be searching through emacs for the strings that needed changing. Thanks for teaching me something so incredibly useful!

Letters from students who should have paid more attention

These are from students who took Lab Techniques, graduated, got jobs, and discovered that their jobs required them to do things we had talked about in Lab Techniques:

From a student who took the course in the Spring of 1998:

I have files with unprintable characters in them... they look like M-_ and M-? and some more like that. I can't figoure out how to get rid of them.

Another one, from that same student:

I can't seem to figure this one out for the life of me, and i'm nearly positive it wasn't covered in lab techniques, but it may be a good exam question for you, if it can be done, here it goes. I have files named: "1 foo bar.ext", "2 foo bar.ext", and so on.... but becasue these files have space in their file names, some programs read them as seperate arguments, and will says, cannot open file bar.ext or somethng like that. I would like to find a way, a simple script, or one-liner, to replace the spaces with underscores, to turn the files into 1_foo_bar.ext, and so on. Maybe i'm crazy, but this should be something not too hard todo, and yet i can't find it.

(He is, incidentally, wrong about whether we covered this in class. We didn't do this specifically, but we did do examples with all of the little parts he needed to assemble this answer.)

From a student who took the course in the Spring of 1997:

i'm sure you already know this, cuz i'm sure you wished it on me, but you will be happy to know that i got a job where i have to use vi, sed and grep! i'm wishing i had payed a whole lot attention to you when i took your class those two or three times...

From a student who took the course in the Fall of 1995:

i know we covered this in class, but I cant' remember and now 'm stuck. I have a bunch of files in all uppercase and need to change them to lowercass... how do i do it?