CMPSCI 187: Programming With Data Structures

Announcements (21 December 2012):

• (21 Dec) I've finished grading the finals and filed the grades. Given the number of you, I'm not going to email grades to people -- they should be available on SPIRE by 28 December.

  The final exam had a high of 107, a low of 24, and a median of 65. I put the A level at 95, B at 80, C at 65, D at 50. There were 4 A+ finals, 8 A's, 7 A-'s, 13 B+'s, 6 B's, 9 B-'s, 11 C+'s, 15 C's, 12 C-'s, 11 D+'s, 14 D's, and 16 F's.

  The overall grades were generally better than the finals, because of the programs and discussions. Of the 132 people who took the final, the grade distribution was as follows: 3 A+'s, 7 A's, 11 A-'s, 15 B+'s, 18 B's, 15 B-'s, 22 C+'s, 24 C's, 8 C-'s, 6 D+'s, 2 D's, and 1 F. Those with final grades below C will not be allowed to go on to 200-level core courses in spring.

  I will post the exam and solution but I won't get to it til after I get back from my Christmas holiday.

• (9 Dec) PDF slides for the final exam review are here.

• (9 Dec) The review session for the final exam will be tomorrow, Monday 10 December, from 1:30-3:00 in room 151 of the Computer Science Building. I'll post my slides from the review here when I have them. The format of the final will be similar to the practice and real finals from Fall 2011 linked from this page. The individual questions on those exams often reference last year's textbook and projects, but the length and difficulty of these year's questions will be similar. Note that full solutions are linked from the same page.

• (7 Dec) I've just posted a last lecture are up.

• (5 Dec) Various students are reporting different numbers for the various word counts in report.dat, even using the exact same Federalists.dat file linked to below. This appears to be due to different file formats and translations done in the course of moving the files. If this is the only problem with your PQFrequency class, don't worry too much about it. (But if your code doesn't compile (on the edlab machines), run, and get essentially the same output that we do, you do have a problem.

• (5 Dec) Ok, along with some more material on the q&a page for Project #5, we also have a output file from running DJW's code (modified to have the right input and output) on the Federalist Papers from Project Gutenberg -- the exact input file we used is here. Your PQFrequency class should have the same output if called on that input file.

• (3 Dec) Notes for Wednesday's lecture are up. These include some material on selection problems, which is not in the textbook.

• (2 Dec) Notes for tomorrow's lecture are up.

• (30 Nov) Notes for the Friday lecture are now up, as are several more questions and answers on Project #5.

• (27 Nov) I cannot hold my office hours 4-5 today because of a department seminar. I'll be available between 3 and 4 instead.

• (27 Nov) Wednesday's lecture notes are up.

• (26 Nov) Today's lecture notes are up. Wednesday's will follow later tonight.

• (20 Nov) I have started a q&a page for Project #5 and will update it as I get more questions (but probably not much over Thanksgiving break).

• (19 Nov) The lecture notes for Wednesday are now up.

• (19 Nov) Lecture #29 is now up.

• (18 Nov) I have posted the Project #5 assignment, due on Friday 7 December, the last day of classes. There is no Project #6, though one page on this site suggested there might be. I will post lecture notes for tomorrow later tonight -- that lecture will say a lot about the project.

• (16 Nov) A reminder about next week's schedule. Thanksgiving break starts on Wednesday at 5:00 pm, so Hannah's Wednesday evening office hours are cancelled and everything is cancelled on Thursday and Friday. There is a discussion Wednesday morning and a lecture Wednesday afternoon. If your travel plans make it impossible for you to come to discussion, let me know and I can excuse you from it.

• (16 Nov) I've just posted tomorrow's (well, today's) lecture slides. I'll try to be better at getting these up in advance. I do plan to give back exams tomorrow -- as of now (12:15 am) I only have to grade questions 6 and 7 on fifteen more of them. I will try to get to the classroom as soon as the previous class is out of there.

• (13 Nov) I have posted the notes for tomorrow's lecture. Remember that there is no discussion tomorrow because we are on a Monday schedule. I will have my 2:30-3:30 office hours.

• (11 Nov) I have posted a copy of the exam and a preliminary solution. (Link to preliminary solution fixed 12 November.) I will probably not have the exams graded by Wednesday but will be able to say something about the scale.

• (8 Nov) The slides for tomorrow's lecture are up. Sorry I didn't get to these very far in advance. Remember that next Monday is a holiday and that next Wednesday is a Monday. So on 14 November there will not be discussion, there will be lecture, and I will have office hours from 2:30-3:30.

• (7 Nov) The slides for today's midterm review are now avaiable.

• (7 Nov) I am posting Ravali's solution to Project #4.

• (4 Nov) The slides for Lecture #25 are now up. Remember that tomorrow, we will lightly cover both Lectures #24 and #25, because we lost last Monday.

• (4 Nov) I will be away from campus and off email all day Tuesday, and must cancel my office hours that day. I will be in New Hampshire working for the candidates of my choice, and I urge you to vote for the candidates of yours if you are eligible.

• (2 Nov) A grading driver for Project #4 is posted here.

• (1 Nov) I've posted a solution for Project #3. This solves only the revised Project #3, but since I made it by taking out methods from a solution to the original Project #3, you may get some ideas about what fields and what methods to put in your Project #4 to get the original Project #3 methods to work.

• (1 Nov) I have to move my office hours today from 2:30-3:30 to 3:00-4:00. Sorry for the late notice -- I tried to email you all but SPIRE would not let me.

• (30 Oct) I've posted some questions and answers on Project #4, which is due on Monday. I'll add to this page as more questions come up.

• (28 Oct) The University has cancelled all classes tomorrow, so our lecture (and all office hours) are cancelled tomorrow. If we are back in business by Wednesday, we will have the discussion I planned, which involves binary search. Please read Section 6.6 and/or read the Lecture 22 notes. I'll give Lecture 22 the next lecture we have. I'll put up notes for the lectures on the original schedule -- if we lose just tomorrow I'll give 22 on Wednesday, 23 on Friday, and a summary of 24 and 25 on Monday 5 November.

• (28 Oct) Next Wednesday's lecture is up. The plan for possible weather disruptions next week is simple -- if the University closes (see here) for any part of a lecture, the lecture is cancelled. If it is closed for any part of the period from 9:05 to 1:10 on Wednesday, then all four discussion sections are cancelled. If we lose lecture time, then portions of Lecture #24 and #25 will not be on the test -- I will know about this for sure by next weekend. If you cannot get to class safely, then stay home -- we have no deadlines during next week except for the discussions if they happen.

• (26 Oct) Next Monday's lecture is up.

• (25 Oct) The Project 4 assignment is up, due a week from Monday.

• (25 Oct) Tomorrow's lecture notes are finally up -- I hope to get next week's up before or during the weekend.

• (24 Oct) I've just added a few more questions and answers to the Project 3 Q&A page. Remember that we are no longer giving a 48-hour grace period for submission problems -- by now we expect you to have your project code on the EdLab machines by the deadline, and that you have tested it in the EdLab environment with our driver. I'll be on-line for email later this evening, but I won't guarantee to answer anything sent after 11:00 pm.

• (23 Oct) I've just posted a revised version of the driver for Project #3, which tests only the functionality required for that project.

• (22 Oct) Because I want to see grades on Project #3 that are a lot better than the grades for Project #2, I am changing that assignment. What is due on Wednesday is now only the first task of the project as it was listed, to create the continentMap method. Those of you who have made progress on or even finished the other two tasks, though, are in great shape because you have now done much of Project #4, to be due on 5 November. There is also now a grading driver for all three tasks. (Note that it expects methods named capitalMap and continentTable, so if you want to test it just on continentMap you will need stub methods with these names.)

• (21 Oct) The lecture notes for tomorrow are up, and I hope to have the Wednesday and Friday notes up tonight.

• (16 Oct) Greetings from Germany. At some point I seem to have lost the link from this page to the discussion assignment directory. I've just put it back now. It has links to material to be used tomorrow in discussion.

• (12 Oct) It may be a while before I get to put up HTML versions of the first midterm and solution. So I am posting the PDF of the exam and a text file with the solution. I'll put up the others after I am done with the grading. I've now graded almost half of them -- so far I think I'm putting the scale at A = 90, C = 60, and the high is 98 (twice), the median is 67 (a high C+), and the low is 28 though there are only a few below 50.

• (12 Oct) The Project #3 assignment is up, due a week from Wednesday which is 24 October. There are two tasks, the first of which you now know everything about and the second of which uses queues, which you will see next Wednesday (or in DJW, or in the lecture slides which are already up).

• (10 Oct) Our final exam has been scheduled for 4-6 p.m. on Thursday 13 December, in Marcus room 131. The second midterm on Wednesday 7 November will also be in Marcus 131.

• (9 Oct) Again, tonight's exam is in Goessman from 7-9 p.m. -- go to room 20 if your last name begins A-L, to room 64 if it begins M-Z.

• (8 Oct) I have posted the slides for tomorrow's review session, which mostly consist of questions from last year's exams. I have also posted the lecture slides for this week and next week. Remember that next week (15-19 October) I will be away. There is no lecture Monday 15 October, and James Allan will deliver guest lectures on Wednesday 17 and Friday 19 October. There will be a discussion that week.

• (8 Oct) I plan to post the Project #3 assignment on Wednesday. It will be due on Wednesday 24 October at 11:59 p.m.

• (7 Oct) I have posted solutions for Project #2. If for some reason you have not yet handed in Project #2, make very sure you don't see these and then hand it in...

• (5 Oct) I am extending the deadline for Project #2 by 24 hours, to 11:59 tomorrow night, Saturday 6 October. The model solution will be available sometime on Sunday. I will not guarantee responses to the cs187help mail address, however, after 10 p.m. tonight.

• (3 Oct) I have just corrected some errors in the driver for Project #2 which prevented it from compiling. I think it is right now, please let me know if it is not. Thanks to the students who pointed out the errors.

• (1 Oct) Update on Project #1 grades: apparently the "grade" text files can be read only by the TA's who created them. I hope this will be corrected soon and I will let you know when it is.

• (1 Oct) I have just posted an untested driver for Project 2 here. I also expect to be adding several questions and answers to the Q&A for Project 2 tonight.

• (1 Oct) The exam a week from tomorrow will be held in both Goessman 20 and Goessman 64, from 7-9 PM. There will be one TA in each room. If people with last names beginning A-L go to room 20 and those beginning M-Z go to room 64, it ought to more or less work out.

• (1 Oct) MassPIRG has asked me to once again remind you to register and vote if you are eligible, and to point you here if you need any assistance in doing so.

• (30 Sept) The lecture notes for the coming week are now posted, in PDF form only.

• (29 Sept) I have started a Q&A page for Project 2, which includes some substantial clarifications of how your code should interface with our driver (which we will get to you at some point).

• (29 Sept) Some announcements from yesterday's lecture you might have missed:
  1. Please be on time for discussions -- losing the first ten minutes of a 50-minute period does serious damage to our plans.
  2. Your grade for Project #1 will at some point appear as a text file called "grade" in your "proj1" directory. The directory called "proj1_grade" in your "cs187" directory, which you can't read, was made by our grading script to have a place to test your code -- you don't need to see it. We hope to have all the grades in place by Monday.
  3. The first exam is a week from Tuesday evening, as it says on the syllabus. As it also says there, a week from Tuesday has a Monday schedule -- during our lecture period that day I will have an optional review session in the normal classroom. If you have a conflict with the exam time of 7-9 p.m., please email me as soon as possible.

• (26 Sept) Notes for this morning's discussion, together with a solution and a link to the five-letter word file, are here. Also, Project 2 is now officially released, due on Friday 5 October.

• (26 Sept) A solution to Programming Project #1 is here. This class contains the additional method to load the object from a text file, which is used in Discussion #3.

• (25 Sept) Please note that if you plan to miss tomorrow's discussion because you are observing Yom Kippur, you can email me and me marked "excused". This is the general policy for all religious holidays. You are responsible for learning about what you have missed.

• (24 Sept) The Learning Resources Center in the library has free tutoring available for CMPSCI 187 -- their schedule of hours is here. We have not yet talked to their tutors about any specifics, but they will have hired people who have done well in CMPSCI 187 or ECE 242 in the past.

• (23 Sept) Next week's lecture notes are up as PDF's, for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

• (23 Sept) A draft version of the Project #2 assignment is up. I will make it official in a day or two.

• (21 Sept) Discussion #3 and Project #2 will use code from the DJW book. You should (before Wednesday) follow the instructions on page 28 of DJW to put their code on your machine. There may be complications with getting that code to the right place on your machine, especially if you are using Eclipse or another IDE, but we are working on advice to deal with that.

• (21 Sept) Remember that you must resolve any problems you have with Project #0 before you can hand in Project #1. Thus if you have outstanding Project #0 problems Monday at midnight, you get an F on Project #1. (Of course there may be rare special circumstances.) The TA's have notified everyone with problems, so if you have no email from them you are ok.

• (21 Sept) The purpose of Project #0 was to avoid the kinds of small errors that make it difficult or impossible for us to grade your projects. If such an error (e.g., a submission in an incorrectly named directory) happens on one of the graded projects, a TA will email you saying that your submission can't be graded. You then have 48 hours from the time of the email to fix the problem. If we do we will grade your project and deduct one letter grade (e.g., from B to C). This rule is not intended for you to have extra time for subsequent work -- we expect that what you submit is essentially what you had ready at the deadline.

• (21 Sept) I have corrected the link below to the driver for Project #1.

• (20 Sept) A driver for Project #1 is now available. Working with this driver is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for your StringBag class to be correct. (Link fixed at 3:30 p.m. 20 September.)

• (19 Sept) I have posted discussion notes for Discussions #1 and #2.

• (18 Sept) Some of you (we'll figure out how many) have missed our "deadline" for Project 0. Our priority is to get you through this hurdle as soon as possible, so that you can submit Project #1 by Monday. The best way to solve your problem is probably at a TA office hour -- I will do what I can in my own office hour as well. But the responibility for figuring this out is yours -- we will not accept "I can't log into the edlab" as an excuse for Project #1, even as a reason for an extension.

• (18 Sept) I have posted the first few questions and answers on Project #1. I will add to this list through the week.

• (18 Sept) Since Apple no longer stores Keynote presentations as single files, I am for now giving up on making the lecture notes available as .key files. You can still get the lecture notes as .pdf files, which is what most or all of you have been doing.

• (16 Sept) The PDF lecture notes for lectures 6 and 7 are up. There is some problem with the Keynote versions. I should have lecture 8 up, at least in PDF, later tonight.

• (13 Sept) I think we mentioned this in most or all of the discussions yesterday, but if you want to change your password on the EdLab you must use the command "yppasswd" instead of the old Unix standard "passwd". It will prompt you for both the old and new one.

• (13 Sept) You may now consider the Project #1 assignment official -- it is due a week from Monday.

• (12 Sept) I have posted office hours for the four TA's above. Note that their office hours are in the lab we use for discussions, LGRT 223, while mine are in my office, room 210 CMPSCI building.

• (11 Sept) Here is a handout for tomorrow's morning discusssion.

• (10 Sept) Today in lecture I said some things about how to access the EdLab and submit your assignment. This will be among the topics of Wednesday's discussion, but here is a summary of what I said. You each have an EdLab account, with a username the same as your OIT username. (Students who entered the class late may have to wait a bit to get accounts.) You can access EdLab machines using the "ssh" command (from a Linux or Mac machine), or utilities such as "putty" and "WinSCP" from a Windows machine. There is some information on how to do this, and some pointers to pages on these utilities, at the EdLab's main page.

  There is a rule to generate your default password which I described in lecture today but am not going to put on a public web page. We'll also review this in discussion. If you have an EdLab account already but have forgotten the password, email system@cs.umass.edu.

• (10 Sept) I've made some changes to the draft Project 1 -- I'm waiting for some more feedback before officially releasing the assignment.

• (10 Sept) This course carries an "R2" General Education designation, though nearly all of you already have an R2 from CMPSCI 121 or a mathematics course. I have just learned that I am required to have a statement in my syllabus about how the course meets the goals of gen-ed as set out by the General Education Council. I have done so, and you may read it if you like.

• (9 Sept) The next three lecture notes are up, covering the coming week. A draft of the the first programming project is also up, though this will not be the official version for a day or two.

• (8 Sept) The first programming project (actually the zeroeth project) is now posted. This is due a week from Monday and is mainly designed to check that you have mastered the procedure to submit work to us through the EdLab. We'll give you your default edlab passwords in lecture Monday and in discussion Wednesday.

• (5 Sept) My office hours for this semester are Monday 2:30-3:30, Tuesday 4-5, and Thursday 2:30-3:30.

• (3 Sept) I have created the lecture notes directory and posted the slides for this weeks lectures, #1 and #2. Remember that you may download these either as Apple Keynote (.key) or ordinary .pdf files.

• (3 Sept) Remember that discussion sections do not meet this Wednesday, 5 September. I will be in my office 10-11 and 12-1 that day for general office hours -- we should figure out general office hours soon.

  I have a few spaces left in the course and am handling them directly (not through SPIRE) so I can give them to the most deserving. If you are not registered and want to join the course, your chances are best if you have already contacted me or Darlene Fahey, the undergraduate administrator. But you can still contact me and come to the first lecture on Wednesday at 1:25.

  Any student who misses both the first two lectures may be kicked out of the course to make room for someone else. The way I will handle this is as follows: At those two lectures there will be "information sheets" which you should take and return to me, answering a few brief questions. If you are registered and I don't have a sheet from you by the end of Friday's lecture, I may kick you out. If you are not registered and want in, make sure that I also have a sheet for you.

• (8 Aug) I have posted the syllabus, though note that almost all the discussion activities are "TBA", meaning "to be announced". I have also posted the course requirements and grading page.

• (8 Aug) It looks like we may not be able to accommodate all the demand for the course, even with our expanded size. If you want the course and cannot add it on SPIRE, please email Darlene Fahey and she will add you to the list of those wanting in. We won't know finally how many we can take until the second week of class.

• (25 July) Note that the discussion sections will not meet on the first day of the course, Wednesday 5 September. We will begin the course with that day's lecture at 1:25.

• (25 July) This section of the main page will serve as a blog for course announcements. Please check it frequently -- you are responsible for what is here and I will use broadcast email only for emergencies. Today I have put up the main page, and in the next day or two I plan to put up the syllabus and the requirements and grading page.

  I taught this course a year ago and you can read the entire website for the Fall 2011 version -- it has exams, solutions, lecture slides, and programming assignments. This offering of the course will be similar to that one, except that: (1) the textbook has changed, (2) we have a somewhat larger class, (3) we have four discussion sections instead of two, and (4) we have access to machines during the discussion sections.