ECS 40A, Winter 2013

01/07/2013: welcome to ECS 40A!

Time MWF 11:00-11:50 AM

Location 1003 Giedt

Instructor Zhendong Su, 3011 Kemper Hall, OH: MWF 10:00-11:00 AM

TA Dara Hazeghi (dmhazeghi AT ucdavis DOT edu)
OH & Location: Tu 3-5 PM (53 Kemper)
Ke Wang (kbwang AT ucdavis DOT edu)
OH & Location: Th 4:30-6:30 PM (53 Kemper)
Liang (Dennis) Xu (leoxu AT ucdavis DOT edu)
OH & Location: M 4:30-6:00 PM (53 Kemper)

Sec 1 F 1:10-2:00 PM, 168 Hoagland (Ke Wang)

Sec 2 M 3:10-4:00 PM, 184 Young (Dara Hazeghi)

Sec 3 F 3:10-4:00 PM, 147 Olson (Dara Hazeghi)

Objectives

ECS 40A teaches students the elements of program design, style, documentation, efficiency; debugging methods; operating system tools; object-oriented programming in C++; and basic data structures and their use. Here are the specific objectives of the course:

Become more familiar with software development tools such as gdb and make to further refine the programming techniques of stepwise refinement, documentation, multi-file program design, and time/storage tradeoffs.
Understand pointers, recursion, file manipulation, and simple data structures such as stacks, queues, and lists.
Learn object-oriented design and implementation of C++, including polymorphism, operator overloading, encapsulation, and inheritance.

Prerequisite

Course ECS 30 with a grade of C- or better. The prerequisite will be strictly enforced.

Textbooks

Deitel, Paul and Deitel Harvey M., C++ How to Program, 8th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall, 2011.

Home Page and SmartSite

Web page: http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~su/teaching/ecs40a-w13/
SmartSite: http://smartsite.ucdavis.edu

Emails to the instructor should only be regarding personal matters and must come from an ucdavis.edu e-mail account with "ECS40: ..." as the email subject. All course questions should be posted to the course discussion forum on SmartSite.

Grading

Your final course grade will be made up of the following components:

Homework (35%): Homework may include both written and programming assignments. Each student must do his or her own work. Students are encouraged to discuss ideas with each other, but each student must write his or her own code. You should never share any portion of your code. More details regarding the assignments and how to submit your solutions will be provided later with each assignment.
Midterm (25%) and Final (35%): Both exams are cumulative, open book and open notes. The in-class midterm is tentatively scheduled for Friday, February 1st. The final will be on Saturday, March 23rd, 3:30-5:30 PM in 1003 Giedt.
Class participation (5%): All students are expected to participate actively in class and forum discussions.

Letter grade cut-offs will be approximately:
A (>= 90%); B (80-89%); C (70-79%); D (60-69%); F (< 60%)

It is expected that all students understand University policies on academic honesty. Cheating on assignments or exams is very serious and will not be tolerated. Any suspected cases will be reported to Student Judicial Affairs.

Late and Regrade Policies

Assignments must be turned in ON TIME to receive credit. Except in the most extreme situations, late assignments will not be accepted. If you cannot complete an assignment by the due date, hand in whatever you have done in order to receive partial credit. We realize that most of you have demanding schedules and some of you may have to work to support yourselves. However, please do not ask us to accept either of these as excuses for late assignments or diminished performance.

Make-up or early exams will not be given except in the most extreme situations. If you must miss an exam due to extreme illness, etc., contact the instructor or leave a message including your phone number in the Computer Science office (752-7004) before the exam.

Regrade requests must be made no later than one week after the graded papers were made available, not from when the student picked up her or his paper. See the teaching assistants for regrades of assignments; see the instructor for regrades of exams. Similarly, any missing or mis-recorded grades must be reported within a week of their posting.