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Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

I took the course the book was designed for at CMU (and with the guys who wrote it, all CS majors have to take it), everyone on campus always knew when "bomb-lab" was happening because people would post on FB "Just defused a bomb", confusing anyone who was new around =P

Not setting off the bomb is pretty easy as long as you remember to set a break point right before the "explode" function before every gdb run. Super satisfying when you get through all six stages. (there's also a secret bonus stage)

The book/course is the best designed one I've ever seen for the subject matter. Highly recommend it for anyone interested in taking it on, and on taking any course that is based on it.

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I also took a class designed around this class at UCLA. The bomb lab was absolutely the standout, both in terms of what I learned and how much I enjoyed it.

Didn't see it mentioned, but the really cool thing is that the bomb required internet access and would phone home to a server to dock points if you let it go off. As you said, all it required was that one breakpoint, but it still made everything feel more critical.

Yea, I didn't mention the "phone home" part, that's important =P

Even though it is "easy" to avoid it, there were still a bunch of people who accidentally triggered it every semester.

I remember opening up the binary in IDA and patching out all the phoning home, allowing me to tinker with it as I pleased. I then patched out all the key checking and hooked it back online, only to realize in horror that all the inputs were validated server side. :(

Maybe the online part is only available for students enrolled at CMU which is not my case. Self-study students download a different binary. Although it would be fun if it also had some online stuff.

If I am not mistaken, the book is called Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (CS:APP) by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron. It's very nicely written, and 3rd edition just came out this year. Coursera also has an archive of a great course based on this book from University of Washington - 'The Hardware/Software Interface'.

You're right, that's what it's called (still have my copy at home). I took the course with Bryant and O'Hallaron. Super smart guys, very nice too. They're the kind of professors that really care more about students learning the stuff rather than administrative stuff or arbitrary policies.

Haven't seen the Coursera course, but it'd be really hard to make a bad course based on this book. It's both creative enough to keep attention, and doesn't skip anything.

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