I recenty ran a 2-day course for someone who was keen to learn more about Linux, C and the Raspberry Pi.

Teaching isn’t new to me, I’ve run courses on my telephone systems, various aspects of Internet operations for people like web design companies and even used to teach something called Engineering Computing during my years at Napier, so to run a 2-day course in my office wasn’t hard and turned out to be a very rewarding experience for both myself and my student!

So what did we do? Started with getting more to grips with the Linux command-line, the use of pipes and redirection. Demonstrating that programmers are lazy (ie. command and filename completion!) We then went on to look at C programming. My student had been doing some C already, but wanted to learn a bit more. Variable scope – the difference between local and global variables. Static variables and so on. We moved on to separate compilation and linking files together – how we can use header (.h) files to give the compiler “hints” about how to call a function in another file.

We also moved on to some of the wiringPi functions too. Talked about concurrent programming and had a brief introduction to threads (with the simplified thread library inside wiringPi).

So a very worthwhile 2 days – it’s always good to share knowledge and meet more like-minded people too, and I’ve just sent my student some homework 😉