The exam will be held on Tuesday, 3/8. It is open-book, open-notes, but no electronic devices will be permitted. It will cover both theory and basics of programming. There will be three parts: a true/false section, a short-answer, and a long-answer (not explicitly programming, but a "thinking" problem).

In general, I'll cover the materials listed below. Note that material covered on slides up to and including February 26 is fair game even if not mentioned here, except when I list exceptions below.

Theory

• Ch. 0: Introduction, study of algorithms, origins of computing machines, abstraction
• UNIX basics (slides)
• Ch. 5.1-5.3
  • Assembly languages/machine code, compilers, machine independence
  • Programming paradigms (but not OOP)
  • Declarative & imperative statements, comments, variables, data types, arrays, assignment statements, control statements (but not goto)
  • Procedures (which I treat the same as functions or methods), parameters (not formal vs. actual parameters, nor value vs. reference)
• Ch. 1.1-1.2, 1.4-1.5
  • Bits, gates, logic diagrams, not flip-flops or cores
  • ASCII codes, binary math (e.g., base 2), conversion between integers and binary, not image or sound representation
• Ch. 4.1-4.6
  • Formal definition of algorithms, algorithms and abstraction, algorithmic primitives, psuedocode
  • Problem solving, getting a foot in the door, stepwise refinement (basic)
  • Iterative structures: sequential searching, loops, binary search, basic algorithm efficiency (big-Oh or big-Theta notation), not insertion sort nor recursion nor software verification

C

• Ch. 1-4
  • How C works, command-line compilation, not IDEs
  • Commenting style (basics)
  • Elements of a program, simple expressions, variables: storage, datatypes, declaration; assignment statements, printf, chars
• Command-line parameters (slides)
• Ch. 5
  • Arrays, strings, string input, reading numbers, initializing variables, constants, operator shortcuts, side-effects
• Ch. 6
  • if, else, strcmp, while, break/continue
• Ch. 8
  • for, not switch
• Ch. 9
  • Global variables, functions, parameters, return values, function prototypes

Java

Note that some of these concepts are covered in multiple chapters, so my chapter references may be slightly vague.

• Ch. 2
  • Basic structure of a program
  • Comments, classes, methods
  • Objects/classes, instantiation, constructors
  • Variables, variable manipulation
  • Output
• Ch. 3, 5, 6.1
  • Variable types, declaration, initialization, reuse, cast/conversion, math operators
  • Basic arrays, command-line parameters (from slides)
  • While, for loops
  • Method declaration, parameters, return values
• Ch. 4 (minimal)
  • If-else
  • Basic console I/O (using the slides, not the Java Gently Stream class)
  • Basic exception handling