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Hints on how to pass this course
General
- Read carefully everything: the textbook, the assignment questions, and the exam questions. The biggest problem students have in this course is due to not reading carfully. Before solving a problem one must understand the problem.
- Do not expect to be spoonfed every little detail. It will be expected of you to use your intelligence, to make appropriate deductions, to deal with underspecified situations.
- Do not learn from memory without understanding. If you learn "how to do something" without understanding it, you are going to have a very hard time in the exams.
- Attend the lectures.
- Do the readings as shown in the Calendar. Furthermore do the readings before class.
- Experiment: try the examples from the book or from class on your own. Make small changes to them and see what happens.
- Don't wait until the last minute to start with your assignments, even if the corresponding topic has not been covered yet in class. If you start two days before the deadline you'll find you won't be able to finnish. Furthermore, the labs get very crowded.
- Once you think you understand the problem, design a solution in your natural language (e.g. English, French, etc.), focusing on the ``big picture'', deferring unimportant details for later. Only after you have a design in your language, you should begin to translate it into Java, dealing with the details.
- If you are stuck, you can ask for help. The TA's and the course lecturers have office hours to help you. You can find their availability in the Office Hours section.
- The syntax and meaning of each concept is precisely defined. There are few exceptions in the Java language, so you should focus on the general rules.
- It is more important to know how to use each feature than to know how to describe it.
- Understanding the basic concepts is an essential aspect of programming, but it is not the only important aspect. It is perhaps more important to know how to use those concepts to solve problems. Therefore you should not focus only on studying the concepts of the course in isolation, but also on how to combine them to solve some simple problems. Study the solutions given to the assignements in the Assignments section.
- A good program is not one that simply "runs". It must be well designed: it must be designed in such a way that it is possible to easily modify, and to easily integrate with other components.
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