Systems Fundamentals

COMP 211 is is UNC Chapel Hill’s Systems Fundamentals course. It is taught by Professor Kris Jordan and a team of 13 teaching assistants.

Systems Fundamentals requires Data Structures and Analysis (COMP 210), and either Discrete Structures (COMP 283) or Discrete Mathematics (MATH 381). Although this class is far less theoretical than those classes, having maturity in these areas is an important foundation to build upon.

The course is taught remotely due to the need for social distancing during the pandemic. As such, the course content is mainly uploaded to YouTube. Subscribe to follow along. A list of asynchronous videos and slides are available here.

The core concepts of the course, as listed in the syllabus, include "data representation, pointers, execution models, memory management, and runtime environments... Processes, input/output, and system calls... Lexical analysis, parsing, interpretation, and translation... Command-line interface tools including shell, editor, compiler, linker, test harness, debugger, version control, and build tooling."