CS106X: Programming Abstractions

Announcements

October 21^st, 2009

I hope everyone is having an awesome week. Today we get to learn all about pointers and linked lists, so get psyched! We're advancing on to some of the more difficult parts of the C++ programming language, but I'm confident everyone can manage, and by learning about these things we'll be able to build custom and generic data structures.

I'm sure you're all delighted at the prospect of taking a CS106X midterm, two weeks from today. The midterm will be open note, open reader, closed computer, and will test everything up through and including the material addressed by the first five assignments. The exam is on Wednesday, November 4^th from 7:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m., and it'll be held in the Gates Building, Room B03. SPCD students are welcome to come to campus, or to take the exam remotely. Remote students who have questions during the exam can call in, and once you're done you can either email or fax your exam over. (The front page of the exam will have cell and fax numbers for you to call.) I'll be handing out a practice midterm next week sometime. Between that and all of the section handouts (compiled mostly from old exam questions), you should have plenty of study materials.

If you'd like, you can follow CS106X on Twitter. I'll likely use it to broadcast announcements and stories I hear about.

October 9^th, 2009

If you don't like this song, then you fail.

October 7^th, 2009

As mentioned in an email that was sent out on Monday evening, I've decided to let everyone to electornically submit Assignment 2 by Saturday, October 10^th at 11 a.m. without penalty. If you need to use one late day, then you can hand the assignment in by Monday's 11 a.m. lecture time.

Note that if you want to add classes, drop classes, or change the number of units you've registered for, then you need to do this by Friday, October 9^th at 5 p.m. This is a new policy, recently set down by the university, and it went into effect this quarter.

Funny: RPS.

October 1^st, 2009

Hey there, folks. I hope you had a fantastic week, and that your Assignment 1 experience was so terrific that you're craving Assignment 2.

Apparently there are some problems with the Assignment Submitter, but those problems are being worked on as I type, and I should hear from the student who wrote it and is fixing it in the next hour or so. I'll send out an announcement alerting the class that it's safe to submit once I hear the good word.

Yesterday during lecture, I mentioned that Stanford is hosting a little programming contest this Saturday. First and foremost, the contest is just an opportunity to meet other programming dweebs like you and me and solve a bunch of fun programming problems (some easy, some medium, a few very challenging) over the course of a few hours. If you're interested in taking part, then download this document right here. It has all of the details about the gathering, including where, when, and what to bring.

September 25^th, 2009

Hey, everyone. I hope you had an awesome first week of classes and that you're all looking forward to your first CS106X assignment, which goes out today!

Macintosh fans need to write their assignments using XCode. Instructions for downloading and installing XCode can be found right here. Those using Windows need a copy of Visual Studio 2008, and instructions on how to get your own copy can be found found right here. All of the campus Macintoshes and PCs already have the proper versions of XCode and Visual Studio, so you're free to use those if you prefer, or you need to because you have trouble installing on your own machines. All of the assignment starter projest will come fully preconfigured so that you can download and code on any machine with the supported development environment.

SCPD students (and anyone living off campus) who want to download Visual Studio 2008 can certainly do so, but in order to connect to the Stanford MSDN site, you first need to securely connect to the Stanford network using VPN software available from http://vpn.stanford.edu.

September 20^th, 2009

Welcome to CS106X, everyone! I'm looking forward to an awesome quarter of coding together.

Class starts on Monday, September 21^st and meets at 11 a.m in Skilling Auditorium every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I'll highlight one detail that's important to make clear right away: All on-campus CS106X students are required to take the final exam during the officially scheduled slot, which is December 11^th from 8:30 until 11:30 a.m. I recognize that some of you may try to take two classes during the MWF 11:00 a.m. time slot, relying on the fact that CS106X lectures are televised and available online. If you're doing this, then make sure your second class isn't requiring you to take an in-class final exam at the same time as mine. The Education Affairs wing of the CS Department recently imposed the restriction that all on-campus students take the exam at the same time, so I'm prevented from offering an alternate final exam. (I'm more flexible about the midterm, since I schedule that outside of normal class time.)

Everyone, including SCPD students, need to visit http://cs198.stanford.edu/section sometime between this Thursday at 5:00 p.m. and this Sunday at 5:00 p.m. to state which discussion section times work best for you. Come Sunday evening, we'll distribute everyone across the discussion sections as optimally as possible and email everyone his/her section assignment. SCPD students need to do this as well, even though you're to be automatically enrolled in the televised discussion section (we're still trying to schedule this, but you'll know shortly.)

Otherwise, sit back and relax and enjoy the CS106X ride.

Submitting Your Work

Electronic Submission

Handouts

Assignments

CS106X Resources