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, 22 June 2009
• Location: Eckhart 202
• Time: Monday 5:30pm-8:20pm
• Mailing List: cspp50101 at mailman.cs.uchicago.edu
• Instructor: Nick Russo
• Office: Ryerson 254
• Office Hours: flexible, send me an email
• TA: William Wentworth-Sheilds
• Sessions (in Ry403 by the whiteboard for now):
  1. 4:30-7:00pm Thursday: including questions on hw due Friday
  2. 1:00-3:00pm Sunday: including extension topics
• Final exam: Monday, 31 August 2009

Tutorials, References

• The MacLab holds live tutorials on unix most quarters. They have an online versions of their Introduction to Unix I & II (PDF) as well.
• Unix Tutorial for Beginners
• The C Book
• 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 are some beginning programming books which look useful:
  1. C Programming for the Absolute Beginner (For the Absolute Beginner (Series).) by Michael Vine
  2. Absolute Beginner's Guide to C (2nd Edition) by Greg Perry
  3. Beginning Programming for Dummies by Wallace Wang
  4. 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

Some homework assignments will be from the primary 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 11:59pm and Monday by 5:29pm.

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

1. Read the Unix Tutorial for Beginners.
2. Create a directory with a descriptive name (e.g., "hw1"), and create 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 (eg. a.out). 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. (cd ..)
4. Type hwsubmit cspp50101 YOUR_DIRECTORY_NAME, and you should see a response in the terminal indicating that the directory has been sent to the grader.

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