Purpose In order to have uniform training across all the 42 campuses, this first part of the curriculum is unique for everyone, providing a minimal set of ICT skills (essential technical skills, and soft skills) suitable for early professional experiences, like internships. This also opens doors to possible campus exchanges and cross-campus projects.
Content In this first part of the curriculum, students will learn the C programming language, and develop simple software using classic algorithms (recursivity, linked lists, sorting, memory management, and string manipulations). The POSIX API allows filesystem access, UNIX process management, network coding, and threads. A simple network and system administration approach is included (IP, subnet, DNS, Docker). Object-oriented programming is introduced, supplemented by a client-server project. This part of the curriculum ends with a complete web project, using a random framework among the classics (Rails, Symfony, Django, etc.).
Blackhole During this part, students can progress at their own pace. This is designed to allow students with a part-time job to earn money and live, also to allow slower students to fully develop their skills. However, they still have a global deadline called Blackhole. If they aren’t fully committed to their curriculum, they should keep this deadline far away. If students do not put in enough effort into 42, or are lazy and immature, they will get caught at some point by this black hole. It just means they are tourists for us and need to leave their place for someone else. This ends their curriculum with no return possible. Students have a maximum of 1 year and a half to complete this first part.
Freeze We know that sometimes, things happen. Each student is responsible to deal with their own matters. Students have a unique tool available to freeze their curriculum up to 3 times, for a maximum total of 6 months.
