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. (Think of Netscape Communicator and its plug-ins, including all kinds of viewers, decoders, cryptography packages, Java virtual machines, etc.) The most important factor in the success of these systems is the ease with which their functionality can be extended and their components upgraded. (Just imagine the disaster if adding an additional MPEG viewer required recompilation of the source code of Netscape Communicator.)

  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, the beauty of the course is that all these topics are presented in concert to provide a coherent whole. It also illustrates why all areas of computer science need to be mastered for even the simplest of projects.

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.

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 rarely 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 all of us.
• Office hours:
  • Amr Sabry (M 11-12 and W 10-12 in DES 313):
  • Yolanda Reimer (U 4-5 and F 1-2,3-4 in DES 341):
  • Tobias Brick (U 12:30-2 and H 2-3:30 in DES 235):
• Reference books for Java: The text you have used in CIS 210 will do fine. Java Software Solutions, Lewis and Loftus, Addison-Wesley.
• Design patterns. I 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.
• Hardware Machines. I recommend: An Invitation to Computer Science, G. Michael Schneider and Judith L. Gersting, West Publising Company, 1995. This book has the design of the hardware machine. You will also be using it in CIS 212.
• Sun's official site for Java.
• The JDK (version 1.1).
• The Java Language specification, HTML version.

Grading

• Nine homeworks: 30%
• Quiz (April 19): 5%
• Midterm exam (April 30): 20%
• Quiz (May 10): 5%
• Final exam (June 10): 40%
• Extra credit problems: Up to 5%