Lecture 1 - January 4, 2000

instructor / tutor information
required texts
the grading scheme
tutorials: when they are, how your students are divided among tutorials, and what a tutorial is. (The TBA tutor is Nikola Koncar)
office hours: instructors and the tutors'.

plagiarism does mean something in the programming context. Many students imagine that only one solution can exist for a programming problem.
it's detectable, though not always detected.
we treat it as a serious offence.

At the end of the course, we adjust the marks to compensate for the varying marking approaches of tutors and instructors.

You will need to read a lot of the course material on your own. In lecture, we won't formally tell you all the rules of Java, for example, though we will cover a lot.
There are things you won't understand immediately. For example, section 2.3 of Arnow and Weiss contains some quite subtle points, and you'll need to go back and re-read it after you get more experience. Reading once is not enough for learning to program.
We will leap ahead occasionally in lecture: on the whole, we won't be far out of step with the text book, but sometimes we'll cover something early or get to it late.
You should be reading chapters 1 and 2 right away, and you'll be doing some stuff from chapter 3 pretty soon too.
You need to practise! Practise, practise, practise! This is the only way to get good at programming.
Assignment A is now available. You should retrieve a copy of the assignment description and the AssignmentA.java code from the course web page. If you are working from campus, this java file will already be in the "handouts" folder. This assignment is not for credit, but it is very important that you do it, so that you don't fall behind.
To get to the assignment web page from my course web page, click on:
- "Official CSC108 web page"
- "The next (current) offering of this course"
- "Assignments"