More initial writeup of first project

README.md

@@ -8,7 +8,16 @@ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
 
 ## Initial Projects
 
-* [Unix Utilities](http://www.ostep.org)
+These projects are meant to get you warmed up with programming in the C/UNIX
+environment. None are meant to be particularly hard, but should be enough so
+that you can get more comfortable programming. 
+
+Realize the best thing you can do to learn to program in any environment is to
+program **a lot**. These small projects are only the beginning of that
+journey; you'll have to do more on your own to truly become proficient.
+
+* [Unix Utilities](https://github.com/remzi-arpacidusseau/ostep-projects/initial-utilities)
+
 
 
 

initial-utilities/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,43 @@
+
+# Unix Utilities
+
+In this project, you'll build a few different UNIX utilities, simple versions
+of commonly used commands like **cat**, **ls**, etc. We'll call each of them a
+slightly different name to avoid confusion; for example, instead of **cat**,
+you'll be implementing **my-cat**.
+
+Objectives:
+* Re-familiarize yourself with the C programming language
+* Learn a little about how UNIX utilities are implemented
+* Learn (as a side effect) how to use a proper code editor such as emacs
+
+## my-cat
+
+The program **my-cat** is a simple program. Generally, it reads a file as
+specified by the user and prints its contents. A typical usage is as follows: 
+
+```
+my-cat main.c
+```
+
+In this case, **my-cat** will read the file **main.c** and print out its
+contents. 
+
+You'll need to learn how to use a few library routines from the C library to
+implement the source code for this program, which we'll assume is in a file
+called **my-cat.c**. 
+
+
+
+
+## my-grep
+
+## my-zip and my-unzip
+
+## my-sort
+
+## my-uniq
+
+
+
+