CSC 214 Section 003

CSC 210 homepage Course overview Prerequisites Important dates Grading policy Audit policy Lectures Programming assgts. Other homework TA office hours Grades Academic integrity

Instructor: Edward F. Gehringer, efg@ncsu.edu, 367 Daniels Hall, 515-2066 Office hours: MW 1:25-2:30 PM, or by arrangement. Text: Suzanne Balik and Matthias Stallmann, The CSC 214 Guide: Programming Concepts in C++. An online version of the coursepack (text) is available in PDF or PostScript. Please let us know if you find any mistakes or have suggestions. Click here for a listing of errors in the coursepack. Class meetings: MWF 12:25-1:15 PM, Withers 210A. Teaching assistants: (Office hours) Rich Killian, rwkillia@eos.ncsu.edu, Sil Greene, sil_greene@unc.edu, Yatkin Chalke, yat_33@yahoo.com, Manish Hirlekar, atriyu@yahoo.com. Current announcements 12/9/00: Click here for the annotated lecture notes. 12/6/00: Last year's CSC 210 final exam is posted here.

Course Overview and Objectives

This is a course in using control and data abstraction to guide program development. The purpose is to foster good programming practices that will be valuable throughout your programming career.

In this course we emphasize essential programming skills including:

• analysis of a problem statement;
• rendering an analysis into a program design; and
• rendering a design into a programming language (C++).

Our goals are for you to:

• learn to recognize and implement basic programming patterns;
• learn some basic components of computational problem solving including finite-state machines, abstract data types, dynamic memory, linked lists, and recursion;
• become familiar with commonly-used tools in the edit-compile-link-execute-debug cycle; and
• become familiar with commonly-used simple data structures such as queues and stacks.

Prerequisites

E 115, MA 141, and a C or better in CSC 114 (a B or better is highly recommended).

Important Dates

	Mon., Sep. 4	Holiday (Labor Day)
	Wed., Sep. 20	Test 1
	Mon., Oct. 2	Last day to drop CSC 210 without penalty
	Oct. 16-17	Fall Break
	Wed., Nov. 15	Test 2
	Nov. 22-24	Thanksgiving vacation
	Mon., Dec. 11	Final Exam (1-4 PM)

Grading

There will be two in-class exams, a final exam, and 6 regular programming assignments. You are expected to attend all lectures, read all relevant portions of the text, do ungraded learning exercises, and read any on-line notes and programs we provide (the ability to read, understand, and modify programs written by others is especially crucial to your success in this course). Missed exams cannot be made up without an official university excuse. Homework should be submitted electronically before 11:00 PM on the due date, usually a Wednesday. For programming assignments after Homework #0, you also need to turn in a paper printout at the beginning of the first lecture after the due date (or sooner). Late homework will not be accepted under any circumstances. However, the total number of homework points available (probably about 150) will exceed the number you need for a perfect score on homework (probably 120). Final grades will be calculated as follows (+/- grading will be used).

Homework	30%
Test 1	20%
Test 2	20%
Final exam	30%

In some cases, a person with a (slightly) lower overall score than another may receive a higher grade if the former has attended class regularly and done all assignments faithfully, while the latter has been absent frequently.

Audit policy

A student registered as an auditor must complete one programming assignment before fall break and one programming after fall break, and score at least 50% on both. Alternatively, an auditor may take the final exam and score at least 50%. A student registered as an auditor who fulfills these requirements will receive a grade of AU; one who does not fulfill these requirements will receive a grade of NR (no recognition).