Bootcamp

Put your foot in foul and fall seven times, eight raised and rise.

(Hagakure)

Piscine is a dev bootcamp, an immersive programming experience of 4 weeks long from monday to sunday no stop. The main advice you have to remember is simple: sleep well, eat healty, work hard.

Understand the problem, search for a solution, ask to your mates, cooperate and mostly TEST, TEST, TEST your code.

UNIX

With great power there must also come great responsibility.

UNIX is a huge family of operating systems from the 70s. UNIX-like variants are:

• Linux
• MacOS

During the whole bootcamp you will use a lot all this stuff.

Shell

Where there’s a shell, there’s a way.

Did you like Learn enough to be dangerous fundamentals from Michael Hartl? Haven’t you done that yet? Go back and take a look, they could give you a good start. This will be your daily bread:

• vim

• git

• bash

These cheat-sheets can be useful. DON’T PANIC you don’t have to learn all the commands at once but understand them well step by step. Try to get used to it as much as possible by doing all the tests. Practice makes perfect.

$ echo "May the unicorns be with you."

C

After the first 2 days you will deal with C programming. Are you stuck? Don’t give up at once, C is one of the most robust compiled language. Take your time.

Each UNIX based operating system is already equipped with several tools.

The system’s basic components include the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU C library (glibc), and GNU Core Utilities (coreutils), but also the GNU Debugger (GDB), GNU Binary Utilities (binutils), the GNU Bash shell and the GNOME desktop environment. GNU developers have contributed to Linux ports of GNU applications and utilities, which are now also widely used on other operating systems such as BSD variants, Solaris and macOS.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Resources

If you already know some programming languages it could help, but you have to understand that this bootcamp has been designed to allow anyone, also with zero knowledge, to deal with this hard way. 42 has its own built-in method, follow it thoroughly.

Anyway this beginner’s guide from Raspberry Pi Foundation could help:

• Learn to code with C

As the author wrote about C:

It can give you control over the smallest details of how a processor operates, but is still simple to learn and read.

(Simon Long)

For sure you can use the dev environment discussed in the previous section. So don’t hesitate and put your hands on it.