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Meets MWF 3:30-4:30 PM |
CS F301-F01 |
Instructor: Dr. Orion Lawlor |
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Utterly Optional Textbook: |
Course Website: http://www.cs.uaf.edu/2012/fall/cs301/ ADA Compliance: I will work with the Office of Disability Services (208 WHITAKER BLDG, 474-5655) to provide reasonable accommodation to students with disabilities. |
By the end of the course, you will understand how your code actually executes on a real machine: from electrons on a semiconductor, to registers and binary arithmetic, to machine code and assembly, to C++ source code. Understanding this process is useful for debugging code, and making your code faster, smaller, and more secure. This course will focus on the middle levels of this chain of abstractions--you'll eventually learn much more about the lower levels (electrons, semiconductors, logic circuits) in EE 341 & CS 441, and about the higher levels (languages, compilers, OS) in CS 331 & 321. To understand this course, you will have to be comfortable with all the basics of C or C++: variables, loops, arrays, pointers, classes, and functions.
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No class (Labor Day): Monday, September 3. |
Pre-Thanksgiving optional lecture:
Wednesday, November 21. |
Academic Help: Rasmuson Library, Academic Advising Center (509 Gruening, 474-6396), Math Lab (Chapman Room 305), English Writing Center (801 Gruening Bldg).
Your work will be evaluated on technical correctness, rationale, and insight. Your grade is computed from four categories of work:
HW: Homeworks and machine problems, typically one batch per week throughout the semester.
PROJ: Two sizable class projects--big programs written in, or relating to assembly, with a short in-class presentation.
MT: Midterm Exam
FINAL: Final Exam (comprehensive)
The final score is then calculated as:
TOTAL = 30% HW + 20% PROJ + 25% MT + 25% FINAL
This percentage score is transformed into a plus-minus letter grade via these cutoffs: A >= 93%; A- 90%; B+ 87%; B 83%; B- 80%; C+ 77%; C 70%; D+ 67%; D 63%; D- 60%; F. The grades “C-”, “F+”, and “F-” will not be given. “A+” is reserved for truly extraordinary work. At my discretion, I may round your grade up if it is near a grading boundary. Grades for each assignment and test may be curved upward by linear scaling, but this is almost never needed.
Homeworks are due by midnight at the end of the day they are due. Late homeworks will receive no grade credit, but you'll sleep better knowing you did them anyway. At my discretion, I may allow late work without penalty when due to circumstances beyond your control, such as attacks by wild animals (“the dog ate my homework” is not acceptable; while “wolves ate my face” may be).
Plagiarism: Everything you turn in must be your own work--violations of the UAF Student Code of Conduct will result in a minimum penalty equal to THAT ENTIRE SECTION OF YOUR GRADE (e.g., one plagiarized homework question will negate an otherwise perfect grade on all homeworks). However, even substantial reuse of other people's work is fine (and not plagiarism) iff it is clearly cited; you'll be graded on what you've added to others' work. Group projects (NOT homeworks) are acceptable iff you clearly label who did what work; but I do expect a two-person project to represent twice as much work as a one-person project.
Department policy does not allow tests to be taken early; but when necessary I may allow them to be taken late. In extraordinary circumstances, such as an ice storm or zombie outbreak, classes may be held electronically via Blackboard/Elluminate Live.
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(September)
Data representation
Table driven programming
Assembly language
Memory access
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(October)
Function calls in assembly
Arithmetic operations and overflow
Project 1 presentations in class
Midterm exam
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(Midterm to Thanksgiving)
Performance and Optimization
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(Thanksgiving to End)
Floating point
Project 2 presentations in class
Final exam
Freedom! |