Lecture notes for Wednesday, 7/9

Test Review

Today, we simply reviewed for tomorrows exam, which is a final exam for the first section of CSCI-A 290/590 and is a midterm exam for CSCI-A 202/598.

Kinds of Questions

I've listed a number of different possible types of questions for the test, so that you won't be too surprised when you see them. Notice that what's missing from this list are "Give a definition" questions. You should know the definitions, but I don't care if you can just repeat what I said in class or what you read on Wikipedia. I'm trying to test whether you understand those definitions, so I'll ask slightly different questions. I've given an example or two of each type of question so you can understand what I mean. These particular questions may or may not appear on the test.

• Short answer
• Give examples
• "List ten different Unix commands."
• "Give an example of a situation where it would be better to use GET instead of POST."
• Explain differences
• "Explain the difference between GET and POST."
• Debugging
• Given a few lines of code, figure out what's wrong with it.
  • "The following MySQL query is supposed to list all the employees who were born after 1980, but running it returns a syntax error. Find the problem and fix it."
• What does this code do?
• Given a few lines of code, describe what it does.
  • "What will the output of the following PHP script look like?"

I've decided not to include any code-writing problems.

Topics

Here is a list of topics that may be on the test. In general, if it's something we did or talked about in class or something you needed to do/know for your homework assignments, then it's fair game for the test.

• Linux/Unix
• moving/copying/deleting files/directories
• permissions
• compressing (gzip) and archiving (tar)
• other miscellaneous commands (ls, cd, man, ps, grep, ...)
• HTML
• forms
• head/body
• basic tags (links, <img>, <h1>, <p>, <br>, ...)
• Python
• general syntax (conditionals, variable types, strings, arrays, ...)
• interacting with forms and CGI (cgi.FieldStorage(), getvalue, getlist, ...)
• PHP
• general syntax (conditionals, variable types, strings, arrays, associative arrays, ...)
• defining functions
• interacting with forms and CGI ($_REQUEST, $_POST, $_GET, ...)
• MySQL
• creating databases/tables
• inserting data into tables
• writing queries
• General Concepts
• CGI
• query strings
• POST vs. GET
• databases
• general design principles
• first, second, and third normal forms
• form validation and defensive programming

General Test Details

The exam will be in class tomorrow (Thursday, July 10th, 2014) at the usual time (9:30 - 10:25am) and in the usual place (Geology Building - room 226). It will be a written test, so bring a pencil. You won't be allowed to use any notes, books, or neighbors. No technology more advanced than a mechanical pencil will be permitted.