Free University of Bozen - Bolzano
Summer Support Course in Programming 2007

About the Course

The purpose of the Summer Support Course in Programming is to repeat (or brush up ;) programming techniques you've seen during your first 2 semesters of your study at the Bachelor in Applied Computer Science. This includes in particular things seen at Introduction to Programming, but also some things seen at Data Structures and Algorithms.

Learning to program a computer is a difficult task - you find yourself battling at least two fronts:

• You need to learn how to analyze a problem; to design a formal procedure to solve it; to implement that procedure using a programming language (write source code); to test and debug the source code and, finally, to maintain that source code.
• You need to deal with the tools (an editor, a compiler, later also an integrated development environment (IDE)) and the syntactic elements of the particular programming language you're using and it's standard library.

When you begin programming, the second front (tools, language syntax and knowledge about the standard library) appears to be the hardest part.

It is not.

You will find this easy after this course. You'll get used to things that look strange at the beginning and everything will seem natural.

What is hard, is the first front -- but that's an argument for the rest of your studies...

Our environment

We will use the Java Programming Language (and sneak a bit into C). Java is not the easiest language to get some very simple programs done. But, it is one of the easiest and best languages that scale to larger projects. At first some "organizational" elements such as access modifier seems to be an overhead. Later, however, you're going to realize they are needed!

A professional programmer would almost certainly use an IDE to write Java source code (for example Netbeans or Eclipse). At the beginning, however, IDEs destract from learning the language syntax. Hence we'll limit ourselves to using a good editor (possibly with syntax hilighting) and compile and run our programs from the command line. After all, no future aircraft pilot did get to use an A380 during his or her first hours airbound, right?

Our environment will typically look like this (showing the gedit text editor and the shell):

Lessons

2007-07-25
Lesson 1 - the false start

• Topics seen: introduction

2007-07-26
Lesson 2 - where we are and where we want to go

• Topics seen: introduction; history of programming; the "crossing the street" procedure written in English; first Java examples: using an editor and the compiler
• Files: list
• Home Work: learn test.java by heart

2007-08-01
Lesson 3 - types

• Topics seen: variables; built-in types int and double; class String; every class is a type; classes and objects; something useful: a program that adds numbers and a small talk program; using Scanner to read input from the keyboard
• Files: list
• Home Work: do exercise 3 (Refactoring.txt)

2007-08-02
Lesson 4 - define & use your own classes

• Topics seen: define your own classes; create objects by calling the constructor using new; private object variables; methods
• Files: list
• Home Work: look up "Alan Turing" in Wikipedia

2007-08-03
Lesson 5 - conditional statements and loops

• Topics seen: conditional statements with if and else; comparison operators: < <= > >= ==; String comparison using .equals(); boolean operators: && || !; while loops
• Files: list
• Home Work: change NumAdder.java from Lesson 3 in such a way, that it keeps asking for integers until the user gives 0 (zero), then show their total sum!

2007-08-08
Lesson 6 - exercises

• Topics seen: exercises on loops: home work solution, linear search of characters in strings; exercises on conditionals: if quiz; exercises on classes: class Product
• Files: list
• Home Work: finish the sell() method in class Product

2007-08-09
Lesson 7 - more exercises; arrays

• Topics seen: Opening a dialog using javax.swing; implement a class representing messages according to given specs; writing a test class for the message class; first steps with Java's built-in arrays; the for loop as a compact way to write a loop
• Files: list
• Home Work: review all the examples seen so far

2007-08-20
Lesson 8 - exerices on arrays and loops; arrays of objects

• Topics seen: a test case for our Product class; exercises with loops and arrays: the sieve of Eratosthenes; The Shop class: handling an array of objects
• Files: list
• Home Work: finish Shop-not-ready.txt

2007-08-23
Lesson 9 - more exercises on writing our on classes and arrays

• Topics seen: solution to the Shop class; the art of writing code according to specifications: the Todo class
• Files: list
• Home Work: open up Todo.java, remove everything but the main method and add the rest on your own, just from the specifications

2007-08-29
Lesson 10 - split groups: doing a lab exam / repeating

• Topics seen group 1: doing lab exam from Nov 21 2006; programming style: writing nested if blocks versus indipendent if blocks; static attributes and methods
• Topic seen group 2: doing exercises on method definitons; a method to copy & reverse an array of integers; static attributes and methods
• Files: list
• Home Work: none

2007-08-30
Lesson 11 - Recursion; Reading text from files

• Topics seen: computing powers using iteration and recursion; other uses of recursion: floodfill, factorial; using our Book class (from lesson 4): reading book records from a file and creating an array of Books
• Files: list
• Home Work: none

2007-08-31
Lesson 12 - exercises on working with arrays of objects

• Topics seen: SearchLib2: static methods to compute things on an array of books.
• Files: list
• Home Work: look through the list of old ITP exams: try to understand the specifications!

2007-09-03
Lesson 13 - exam exercise; computing some math functions; understanding compile-time and run-time errors

• Topics seen: do old exam exercises individually; computing inverse, square root and absolute values: treating invalid values of the argument using exceptions; Debug.java: understanding compile-time and run-time errors
• Files: list
• Home Work: none

2007-09-04
Lesson 14 - exam exercise

• Topics seen: the letter queue exam example: Part 1
• Files: list
• Home Work: none

2007-09-05
Lesson 15 - exam exercise

• Topics seen: the letter queue exam example: Part 2; finishing up, questions
• Files: list

Schedule

 lesson  |         date          
---------+-----------------------
 1/15    | Wednesday July 25
 2/15    | Thursday July 26

 3/15    | Wednesday August 1
 4/15    | Thursday August 2
 5/15    | Friday August 3

 6/15    | Wednesday August 8
 7/15    | Thursday August 9

 8/15    | Monday August 20
 9/15    | Thursday August 23

 10/15   | Wednesday August 29
 11/15   | Thursday August 30
 12/15   | Friday August 31

 13/15   | Monday September 3
 14/15   | Tuesday September 4
 15/15   | Wednesday September 5

References

• Introduction to Programming Course Home Page
• Introduction to Programming - Prof. Calvanese's Lecture Notes
• Data Structures and Algorithms Course Home Page
• Sun Microsystem's Java Home Page
• Java system library documentation
• Wikipedia