Home Page for CIS 211

Study Guide

Homeworks and Grades

What is CIS 211 about?

• Program Construction: Modern software systems are built by composing independent components. The most important factor in the success of these systems is the ease with which their functionality can be extended and their components upgraded without having to rewrite or even recompile previously written code.

  In this course, we will emphasize program construction techniques, also called design patterns, that lead to flexible and extensible software systems. For now, you can think of a design pattern as a style of writing that leads to elegant code.

• Evaluation Model: It is impossible to become a good programmer without having an understanding of how programs evaluate. At the end of the day, programs execute on hardware machines with physical limitations on the number of registers, the size of the memory, etc, and programmers must understand the basics of these machines and be aware of their limitations.

  In this course, we will build a Java model of a simple hardware machine, called the Duck Machine.

The Duck Machine

The exercise of building the Duck Machine will serve several purposes:

• First it will explain the architecture and organization of a hardware machine and the evaluation of programs at that level.
• Second it will serve as an example of a modern software system that must be built to be flexible and extensible. Indeed we will emphasize the use of sophisticated design patterns during the implementation.
• Finally, the organization of the course around the implementation of a hardware machine leads to a natural overview of some of the most important fields of computer science including computer organization, operating systems, software engineering, programming languages, data structures, algorithms, and user interfaces. More importantly, all these topics are presented in concert to provide a coherent whole, which illustrates why all areas of computer science need to be mastered for even the simplest of projects.

Study Guide

A word of warning: This course does not follow one textbook. Instead there are three main sources of information: the lectures introduce programming concepts; the books are references for you to consult about specific points you want to understand in greater detail; and the labs put these concepts into practice.

I will not always hand out complete solutions to homework problems. Instead I am always available for questions: I will explain the underlying concepts as many times as needed, give hints to the solution, and encourage you to develop your own solutions.

Resources:

• Lecture notes and code from lectures.
• Email assistance. Send email at any time to any or all of us.
• Office hours:
  • Amr Sabry, sabry@cs.uoregon.edu: (U 1:30-3:30 and W 11-12 in DES 313)
  • Joshua Madden, jmadden@cs.uoregon.edu: UH 2-3, W 3-4 in DES 227
  • Pulumati Laxman Rao V., laxmanpv@cs.uoregon.edu: MWF 3-4 in DES 229
• Sun's official site for Java.
• The JDK (version 1.2).
• The Java Language specification, HTML version.

Reference books for Java:

Reference books for design patterns:

A smaller and more recent book by one of the authors of the classic above is Pattern Hatching: Design Patterns Applied, John Vlissides, Addison-Wesley, 1998. It tries to present design patterns in a real context of use.

A book that focuses on Java is Patterns in Java (Volume I) A Catalog of Reusable Design Patterns Illustrated with UML, Mark Grand, Wiley, 1998.

I also recommend A Little java with Patterns, Matthias Felleisen and Dan Friedman, MIT Press, 1998. This book will really teach you about recursion and the interpreter and visitor patterns. It is a somewhat radical approach to teaching programming, but you will learn a lot from it ... if you have the patience.

Reference books for hardware machines:

Grading

• Nine homeworks: 30%
• Midterm I (April 17): 10%
• Midterm II (May 12): 20%
• Final exam (June 8): 40%
• Extra credit problems: Up to 5%

Lectures

• Programming concepts like abstraction, classes, objects, inheritance, interfaces, recursion, exception handling, streams, threads, and reflection.
• Design Patterns like the interpreter pattern, the visitor pattern, and the model/view/controller pattern.
• Hardware Organization like the arithmetic and logic unit, the central processing unit, the fetch-decode-execute cycle, etc.