CS 211 teaches foundational software design skills at a small-to-medium scale. We aim to provide a bridge from the student-oriented How to Design Programs languages to real, industry-standard languages and tools. We begin by learning the basics of imperative programming and manual memory management using the C programming language. Then we transition to C++, which provides abstraction mechanisms such as classes and templates that we use to express our design ideas. Topics include expressions, statements, types, functions, branches and iteration, user-defined types, data hiding, basic UNIX shell usage, and testing.

Prerequisites

CS 111 or proficiency with the HtDP Design Recipe. No further experience is required or expected.

Assessment

We will have two 80-minute, in-class exams:

• Tuesday, February 4
• Tuesday, March 10

There will be no final exam.

References

• C reference
• CS 211 Style Manual—follow this!
• C++ reference
• GE211 reference
• If you can’t find your answer in one of the above references, you should try our Campuswire discussion board

Software

In a few weeks, we will switch to a full-featured IDE (integrated development environment). For now, however, all you need is a terminal emulator and SSH client to login to your shell account.

• Mac: Your computer comes with Terminal.app and OpenSSH, so you have everything you need. (Your instructor uses iTerm2 instead of Terminal.app.)
• Windows: PuTTY is a free program that does both terminal emulation and SSH. The easiest way to install it is the MSI installer.
• Linux, UNIX, etc.: You need an SSH client (e.g., from Ubuntu’s openssh-client package) and probably a terminal emulator (e.g., xterm or rxvt).

Books

Optional textbooks:

Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language, Second Edition. Prentice Hall, 1988.

The classic C book from the language’s inventors. The language has evolved somewhat in the 30+ years since the second (and most recent) edition was published, but it’s still the clearest introduction I know of.

Bjarne Stroustrup, Programming: Principles and Practice, Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, 2014.

Introductory programming book by the primary designer of C++. It’s a bit quirky, but a reasonably gentle introduction by the genius behind the madness.

Paul Deitel & Harvey Deitel, C++ How to Program, 10th Edition. Pearson, 2017.

Big, heavy, comprehensive textbook—likely overkill unless you like that sort of thing.

Scott Meyers, Effective Modern C++. O’Reilly, 2014.

For after the course, not during. If you want to continue using C++ and use it well, this book will teach you a lot.