The course meets 2.30--3.20 am Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 125 Trowbridge Hall. Each student is also registered for and will attend a weekly discussion section conducted by one of our TAs.
Kasturi Varadarajan, 101D MacLean Hall, Phone: 335-0732, email:firstname-lastname@uiowa.edu
Programs, in the course of performing computation, often need to store, query, and update large, or somewhat large, amounts of information. There are usually different ways in which the program can be designed to do this information processing. Some of these ways are good, and others not so good. In several contexts, this distinction is crucial -- it can determine whether an application is useful or completely useless. In brief, then, the goal of this course is to learn that there are usually these different ways of doing the information processing, which are called data structures, and to learn to be increasingly sensitive to the distinction between the good and the bad ways.
That is a lofty goal, but we will begin in a modest way, by first acquiring familiarity with the constructs in Java, the programming language we will use. We will then learn some rather neat things to do, like solving problems using recursion and building linked lists.
We will then dive into several data structures, such as stacks, queues, lists, trees, priority queues, hash tables, and binary search trees. Each of these is a good way of processing information in some contexts, as we will see. Finally, assuming time permits, we will finish off by discussing graphs and basic algorithms on graphs, which illustrate quite well the idea of a good data structure.
For our textbook, we will use "Data Structures and Algorithms in Java", by Goodrich and Tamassia, ISBN 978-0-470-38326-1.
Computer Science I (22C:016). Discrete Structures (22C:019) is a corequisite if not taken as a prerequisite.
The grading will be based on several homeworks (35 percent), quizzes (5 percent), two in-class midterms (15 percent each), and the final (30 percent).
There will be a quiz every friday that will take no more than five minutes. I expect there to be twelve to fourteen quizzes overall. Each quiz will be worth 1 point. Your overall grade on the quiz will be the minimum of 5 and the expression (5 * total points on quizzes)/10. Notice that you can do 10 quizzes perfectly and get the maximum grade on the quizzes. So you will not be allowed to make up missed quizzes.
Roughly speaking, there will be a homework every week, and I will try to make these due on Monday. This way, you may make greater use of the TA discussion sections on thursday. Most of the homeworks will involve programming in Java.
The policy on late homeworks is that you have a quota of three days for the entire semester that you may use for late submissions. So for example, there will be no penalty if you submit the fifth homework a day late, the seventh two days late, and the rest of the homeworks on time. Once you use up your quota of three days, any homework submitted late will not be accepted and you will get 0 points for that homework.
When you submit a homework X days late, your quota gets decreased by X irrevocably. You can only be late by an integer number of days -- if you submit 10 hours after the deadline, for example, your quote is depleted by one day.
The midterms will be in our usual classroom and during our class on Wednesday, Sep 21 and on Wednesday, Oct 19. The final will be at 7.30 am -- 9.30 am on Tuesday, December 13, in our usual classroom. (The final is scheduled by the Office of the Registrar.)
Section Time Location TA A01 8:30-9:20 Th 14 SH Daniel A02 9:30-10:20 Th 110 MLH Rajeev A03 2:00-2:50 Th 118 MH Rajeev
Kasturi 3.30--4.30 Mon, 3.00--5.00 Thu 101D MLH Daniel 2.00--3.00 Tue, 2.00--3.00 Thu 101C MLH Rajeev 9.00--10.00 Mon, 10.30--11.30 Thu 201G MLH