Darren Provine at Rowan University

Computer Lab Techniques - Syllabus

Textbooks:

The required texts are Unix in a Nutshell, by Robbins et al, and The C Programming Language, by Kernighan & Richie. The recommended text is Programming With GNU Software, by Loukides & Oram.

All three should be available at the bookstore.

Grading:

There will be three exams, each worth 100 points. There will be between 5 and 10 homeworks, worth 10 points each, and 5 - 10 quizzes worth 10 points each.

The total number of points earned during the semester by each student is computed, and then assigned a letter grade based on a standard normal distribution. I'll explain the math in class.

Homework policy:

I encourage you to work together in lab on the lab exercises. If you choose to work in teams on homework, hand in only one copy with everyone's name on it. Teams may not have more than two people.

If I get several copies of an assignment, instead of one copy with several names on it, I will be forced to conclude that somebody cheated. Since it is not always possible to figure out who, I will have to give a zero to everyone involved.

If you work in a team, be sure you understand how the program works: do not get lazy. When you take the exams, you will be on your own. If you don't understand the problems you hand in to me, you will be doomed on the tests.

Course prerequisite:  Computer Science and Programming 1 (1704.103), or equivalent preparation

You should be able, before taking this class, to write working programs that read data from the keyboard, including dealing with arrays.  You should have an understanding of files and directories (aka "folders"). You should be familiar with the principles of editors.  If you cannot write a program to read in 10 numbers from the keyboard and print out the arithmetic mean, the largest number, and the smallest number, you may find this class too difficult.

Ideally, you will have learned to program in either Java or C/C++, but this is not a requirement.