This is a course about the practice of programming, an attempt to expose
students to the development of real programs. Programming is more than just
writing code. Programmers must also assess tradeoffs, choose among design
alternatives, debug and test, improve performance, and maintain software
written by themselves and others. At the same time, they must be concerned
with compatibility, robustness, and reliability, while meeting specifications.
Students will have the opportunity to develop these skills by working on their
own code and in group projects.
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COS 333 is about programming, not about a specific language. The course will
assume that you are familiar with C, and will include excursions into C++,
Java, and Visual Basic, and scripting languages like shells, Awk, Perl, and
Tcl. There will be significant emphasis on tools, both how to use them and
how they are designed and built. The course will use Unix and Linux more than
Windows, but not exclusively. Students must be comfortable with C programming
and Unix, and able to write modest-sized programs that work. COS 217 is a
prerequisite.