Saturday, January 30th Agenda for 2nd lecture:
Click here to jump down to older postings: older posting
First, beginning students
should read the course syllabus:
The written lectures are all available on line through this
home page. This course is available through distance education.
As the term progresses the video lectures will be published on a weekly basis.
The first two lectures are available without credentials. For a short time
(late December/early January) the first two lectures will remain on line.
[CSCIE160 Video Page]
I recommend that you read
This will explain the unorthodox views of the lecturer on the significicance of lectures as
live, public events, as opposed to printed essays.
Each student will be assigned to a Teaching Fellow (TF). If you live close enough to attend
on-campus section meetings
you will be assigned to a TF who will hold weekly section meetings, on a day to be determined
at the start of the term. There is no plan to video record section meetings.
Older postings:
Monday, January 25th.
A commericial IDE that has won the approval of advanced Java developers is
IntelliJ IDEA from JetBrains.
JetBrains has granted students in this course a free license for the product which runs though
September 1, 2010. License keys are found in IDEA for students of this course.
This information is provided as a convenience. Use of Idea is not required of students in this course.
Saturday, December 26, 2009 One theme that will
be emphasized over the course of the term is this: The twin
enemies of good software are complexity and the impulse to be clever.
The failure to manage these two sofstware traits is behind the story of the
biggest software failure in history, the collapse and abandonment of
the $170 Million Virtual Case File system of the FBI. The story is
told here in two articles:
Who Killed the
Virtual Case File? [IEE Spectrum] By Harry Goldstein
Lateness policy. I struggle with this issue every time I teach
a software course. Deadlines are always somewhat arbitrary and
I have a deep-seated aversion to penalizing people for missing
a deadline. Any software manager that told his/her
developers that they would be penalized 5% of their salary for every
month their software was delivered late, would soon be recruiting a new
team of developers. Yet the real world has deadlines. If you
are two years late in releasing your software, your competitors
will probably have a seasoned product in its second or third release
and your product will be still born.
In our case the Extension School deems that beyond a certain date
students may not submit work for their courses. Another practical
concern is the impact of a generous lateness policy on the Teaching
Fellows. It is not fair to the Teaching Fellows to expect them to
grade an entire semster's work all submitted on the drop-dead-date.
Taking all these conflicting facts and opinions into account
I have arrived at the following policy on late homework submission:
- Homeworks #1, #2, #3 may be submitted
up to four weeks after their due dates without lateness penalty.
- Homeworks #4, #5 and #6
may be submitted up to two weeks after their due dates without lateness penalty.
-
The project must be submitted on time, unless you have applied to the Extension School
for an Extension Of Deadline.
- You may not apply for an EXT without completing homeworks #1, #2 and
#3.
- Beyond these four and two weeks extensions the Teaching Fellows
will use their discretion about grading work. Be advised that the Teaching Fellows may
refuse to accept work after these additional time periods have elapsed.
Non-Credit Status.
If you register for non-credit your Teaching Fellow will evaluate your
homework, give you comments and advice, and assign a grade to your work.
However, at the end of the course you will receive a grade of N/C
from Harvard Extension School, not a letter grade. Some employers
who reimburse students for their tuition costs require a letter grade,
i.e. A, B, C, D, or F. If you are considering taking the course as
a non-credit course and you are expecting your employer or other sponsor
to pay for your tuition, you should check to see what are the requirements
to get that reimbursement. Get it right before you take the course because
you can not change from non-credit to for-credit once you have registered.
Plagiarism. Plagiarism is grounds for forced withdrawal from
a course. Submitting duplicate or nearly identical work of another student
is considered plagiarism. If you intend to collaborate with another student
in the course, please explain the details of how you intend to collaborate
with me. There have been cases of such forced withdrawal from this course in
the past.
