Concepts of Programming - CSPP 50101

Description

This course is an introduction to programming -- no prior programming knowledge or experience is required. The goal is to familiarize students with the fundamental components of structured programming -- memory management, algorithms, data structures, modular design, etc. The course emphasizes fundamental concepts and elementary program design. Upon completion of the course, students should be well prepared to branch out into more modern, application-specific, and/or higher-level programming models.

Administrivia

• First class: Monday, 18 June 2007
• Location: Ryerson 251
• Time: Monday 5:30pm-8:20pm
• Mailing List: cspp50101 at mailman.cs.uchicago.edu
• Instructor: Nick Russo
• Office: Ryerson 254
• Office Hours: by appointment
• Extra sessions:
  1. Monday 8:30-9:00pm after class in Ry251
  2. Thursday 5-6:30pm in Ry402
  3. Friday 5-6:30pm in Ry402
  4. Sunday 3-4:30pm in Ry402
• Final exam: Monday, 27 August 2007

Tutorials, References

• The MacLab holds live tutorials on unix most quarters. They have an online versions of their Introduction to Unix I & II as well.
• Unix Tutorial for Beginners
• C Programming
• C Language Tutorial
• C Programming Tutorial
• Programming in C: A Tutorial (historical)
• C programming language
• C and C++ Style Guides
• Debugging Under Unix: gdb Tutorial
• GNU Coding Standards
• Notes on K&R
• ANSI C Specification (ISO/IEC 9899:1999)

Books

• Required: The C Programming Language, Second Edition (K&R), by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. "Short and sweet and to the point" -- Mark Shacklette
• Required: Pick one of the following, depending on your background.
  
  1. C For Dummies, 2nd Edition by Dan Gookin
  2. C Primer Plus (5th Edition) by Stephen Prata
  3. C: A Reference Manual, Fifth Edition, by Samuel P. Harbison III and Guy L. Steele Jr is a more recent reference which covers all flavors of C.
• Here's an Amazon wishlist of some beginning programming books which look useful:

   C Programming for the Absolute Beginner (For the Absolute Beginner (Series).) by Michael Vine
   Absolute Beginner's Guide to C (2nd Edition) by Greg Perry
   C For Dummies, 2nd Edition by Dan Gookin
   Beginning Programming for Dummies by Wallace Wang
   Beginning Programming (Wrox Beginning Guides) by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Kathie Kingsley-Hughes

Academic integrity

Students are expected to have read and understood the University's policy on Academic Integrity, as detailed in the Student Manual of University Policies and Regulations.

Homework

Many homework assignments will be from the required text, K&R. For problems which don't result in a full program, write up your experiences in a few sentences, including code snippets and error messages where appropriate. Typically, homework due Monday will include concepts or practices which will help with the programming assignment due Friday. Homeworks are due Friday by 11pm and Monday by 5pm.

Submit homework assignments using the unix command, hwsubmit cspp50101, available on departmental Linux computers.

1. Read the Unix Tutorial for Beginners.
2. Create a directory with a descriptive name (e.g., "hw1"), and put all relevant files in that directory. For programming assignments, that would include your Makefile, source code (.c) and header (.h) files, and any data files used for testing, but not object files (.o) or compiled programs. For short answer assignments, plain text files with numbered answers are appropriate. Do not submit documents in MS Word or RTF format.
3. Change to the directory directly above that one.
4. Type hwsubmit cspp50101 YOUR_DIRECTORY_NAME

If all goes well, you will receive a notice that the assignment has been submitted.

Course Software

We will use GCC on the departmental Linux computers. On your own machine running MS Windows you may be interested in Open Watcom, Visual C++ 2005 Express, or another free C/C++ Compiler, but your code will be evaluated on the departmental systems.

Syllabus