ACS Training - Socorro 2004

Last ACS 3.5 days Course: 2004 July the 13th –July the 16th

This document contains the Agenda for a 3.5-days ACS Course in Socorro.

Most of the participants to this course have interest in C++ development for high level software (Pipeline, Offline, Archive).

Each item in the agenda links to the corresponding course material (typically Power Point presentations). Still a number of presentations contain little or no material, since the presentations have been given directly on the whiteboard or with a PC live demonstration, but we want to improve and extend this material in and for future issues of this course. If you have suggestions or material that can integrate what available now, you are encouraged to contribute it.

Although the Agenda looks quite detailed, the idea is to be flexible and adapt dynamically the program to the needs and knowledge of the participants. This means that we expand and contract the time allocated to the various topics based on the feedback collected during the course.

We assign plenty of time for exercises, because we want the participants to get an actual on-hands experience. Again, if needs arises, exercise time can be traded with discussions and with extensions to tutorial topics.

Prerequisites:

Compressing an ACS course in just 3.5 days is really a tough job, as we have seen in previous occasions.

We have therefore decided to skip some introductory and general presentations that take a relevant amount of time, but that we think can be replaced by requiring the participants to read in advance some background documents and ask questions during the first day of the course.

These are therefore the prerequisites readings for getting the best out of a 3.5 days ACS course:

Tuesday the 13th : Get your hands on ACS

Wednesday the 14th: Error System and Properties

Thursday the 15^th: Asynchronous communication and ABeans

Friday the 16^th (1/2 day): Bulk Data and Logging System

Unused presentations

The following topics have not been covered in this course by explicit presentation.
Some of the argument discussed by these presentations have been discussed on the whiteboard or during the exercises.
Others have not been touched at all. They have been covered in previous courses and might be in upcoming courses, depending on the specific requirements of the course.

We have left them here for reference, but please be aware that the information might refer to older versions of ACS and might not be up to date.

Course examples

During the whole course, the presentations will develop one single example (a telescope Mount).

The code for the example is in the ACS CVS archive under: ACS/LGPL/CommonSoftware/acscourse.

You can fing here:

Course exercises

During the course we will create groups that will develop and exend an exercise during the whole duration of the course.

This section now contains the work done for the previous course and the new exexcices will be put here after the course.

We have therefore 3 exercises available, that are put here online.
The three groups are expected to cleanup and improve the exercises as a followup of the course.
Once the cleanup will be completed, the 3 exercises will be archived in the ACS CVS server for further usage and extension:

Course setup and computing facilities

(This section now contains the work done for the previous course and the new exexcices will be put here after the course).

We have used 4 PCs with Linux RH 9, ACS, Eclipse and NetBeans installed and we assume that people will work in groups of 3.

 Other links:

• User home directory configuration tar file
  All files are unpacked in the UserHome directory.
  From there they have to be copied in the home directory of the account to be configured.