Prospectus for your Midterm Project

  When: Due Friday, October 15 by 10am

  What: (1) a short summary of what you expect to accomplish

        Account Management System -

          database record types - 'account', 'sale', 'table', ...
          example data - an 'account' record will look like ...
          reports - mock up what sorts of reports you'll generate
          ...

        Cryptanalyst's Tool Kit -

	  a method for selecting candidate partial substitution codes, ...
          a method forscoring partial candidate substitution codes, ...
	  tools for using histograms, dictionary searches, partial matches 
          ...

        Dynamic Web Content -

	  given a directory containing images/photos produce, ...
	  given a list of the names of image files, ... 
	  produce an HTML document containing a table, ...
          ...

        (2) a description of each command that you plan to write

        Account Management System -

          db_select - takes ... arguments, ... 
          db_join - takes ... arguments, ...
          db_report - takes ... arguments, ...
          ...

        Cryptanalyst's Tool Kit -

          crypt_codes - takes ... arguments, ..., generates ...
          crypt_search - takes ... arguments, ..., prints ...
          crypt_score - takes ... arguments, ..., returns ...
          ...
        
        Dynamic Web Content -

          web_album - takes ... arguments, ..., generates ...
          web_thumbs - takes as an argument a directory ...
          web_table - takes ... arguments, ..., creates a table ...
          ...

        (3) the directory structure for the project 

        ./README          - THIS FILE 
        ./doc/manual.txt  - description of software and how to use it
        ./bin/README      - annotated listing of all shell scripts
              ...         - the shell scripts writen for the project
              ...
        ./tmp/...         - directory for demonstrating your project 
              ...
        ./data/README     - annotated listing of all the data files
               ...        - sample messages to encrypt and decrypt for 
               ...          the Cryptanalyst's Tool Kit, sample images
               ...          for the Dynamic Web Content project, examples
               ...          of file-based database records to show off
               ...          the Account Management System project

  Suggestions:

    Define the basic core parts of the project - the most essential
    functions - and then describe additional features.  You can start
    by building this minimal core and then add features as time
    permits.  Professionals take 'snapshots' of their code from time
    to time; then if things get all snarled up they can revert back to
    a snapshot when things were working.  Taking a snapshot can be as
    simple as just copying the directory tree that contains your work.

    % cp -R project backup 

    Use the resources that we've provided you:

     Basic Unix Commands and Utilities   - commands.txt
     The C-Shell Scripting Language      - scripts.txt
     Some Tips on Debugging Scripts      - debug.txt

    These files are in /u/tld/tmp/exercises/doc/.

    Also, make use of what you've learned to take full advantage of 
    these resources. For example, suppose that you want to find the
    documentation on 'sed'; you might use 'grep' as follows:

    % grep -n "sed" ./doc/*.txt
    doc/commands.txt:10:        6. The 'sed' Utility
    doc/commands.txt:185:    sed 's/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/g'
    ...

    The '-n' option causes 'sed' to print out line numbers. You can open
    the file 'commands.txt' and then either search for 'sed' (use CTRL-s
    for interactive searching) or go directly to the line by typing:
    META-x then 'goto-line' followed by a carriage return and at the 
    prompt enter the number of the line you want to look at.

    If you're trying to find an exercise that dealt with a particular 
    command, e.g., 'sort', then the following might come in handy:

    % grep -n "sort" ./04/*/*/exercises.txt
    ./04/09/20/exercises.txt:43:   # eliminate repeated lines in a sorted
    ./04/09/20/exercises.txt:62:   % cat text.txt | sort -k1,1nr -k2
    ..

    Finally remember that all the commands are in 'bin' directories;
    so here's how you might search for the name of a command that we
    used in class:

    % ls ./04/*/*/bin/* | grep "sorthat"
    ./04/09/27/bin/sorthat