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This course will essentially be an Introduction to Computer Science with C# intended for quickly starting grad students or mature aspiring graduate students who are transitioning from another field. You should be looking to compress into one regular semester both this introduction and the Comp 388-5 Foundations II course.
With the speed of the course, you will be expected to be prepared for the first class by looking ahead of time at the online course book/videos through at least section 2.6. In fact because of the speed of the course you are encouraged to look ahead further before the first class.
The total contact hours and content of this course will almost totally match my Comp 170 course, except this course is compressed into 8 weeks, to make room for Foundations II afterward (covering at least Comp 271 material).
Time and Days: Mondays (4:15 PM - 8:15 PM) replacing holiday/vacation Mondays with Fridays (4:15 PM - 8:15 PM). So the Monday/Friday class schedule is: Mon, Aug 29; Fri, Sept 9; Mon, Sept 12; Mon, Sept 19; Mon, Sept 26; Mon, Oct 3; Fri, Oct 14; and Mon, Oct 17. Labs meet on consecutive Thursdays, 4:15 pm - 6:30 pm: Thurs, Sept 1 through Thurs, Oct 20. Mondays and Fridays are in LT 410 lab and Thursday in the Corboy 201 lab.
I am planning final project presentations in the last lab class.
Note: Classes are in labs, but you or your partner, if you choose one, are strongly encourages to bring a notebook computer configured the way you need it. The lab setup has to be reinitialized each class.
This course page provides quick links the are useful for Comp 388-4. If you are just starting, the place to go is the Ground Rules, which introduces all the other links on this page except the references to other programming languages.
Ground Rules Course administration and requirements -- READ THIS FIRST
Course Schedule and Assignments This is the main link for day-to-day progress.
Contact information, office hours
Downloads associated with the notes
Class Examples folder (Later examples and handouts not linked directly to the formal online book)
Pair Programming: Administration, How to Pair Program
Tutoring Schedule and Tutor Photos (Click on a name.) Check this out when you want some help!
Another free C# book online, with a fair amount of overlap with our book, has a link on http://www.csharpcourse.com/: Click on the link for Rob Miles CSharp Yellow Book 2012.pdf (or the latest year). This is concise, free, and often funny book. It is one alternative, an introduction and reference to C# with a glossary, central examples developing the ideas, but no practice or review exercises. This text also covers Microsoft Visual Studio and GUI programing, which we are skipping in our course.
Free interactive testing of your ability to read bits of C# and predict the path of execution (playing computer): http://problets.org/user/f16/luc/. This understanding is important before writing your own code. Advantages: free, gives step by step answers, adaptive to your level. Disadvantages: slow, picky about order, may be blocked due to security settings that are hard to fix, and does not work in Chrome.
Python (another excellent free object-oriented language, that I will sometimes make passing reference to for comparison)
Java Developers' Page C# has evolved partly from Java, and we are likely to make some comparative references.