intro-c-programming

In 1992 I was working for the Computer and Information Sciences department of the university of Pennsylvania. I was asked to teach the summer session of CSE 110, the introduction to programming class for non-CS majors. This I did. I did not like the course materials I was given, so I assembled and taught a different course.

One noteworthy difference between this class and typical introduction to C classes is in its treatment of pointers. In most C clases pointers are left until the end, as an advanced topic. This class introduces them as early as possible. This was an extremely successful approach, which I strongly recommend.

The class met for 90 minutes per day, four days a week, for five weeks.

This repository contains:

• lec-notes

  Each day I wrote up the notes from the previous day's lecture. There are no notes from lecture 1, as I didn't give this lecture. The lecture notes total about 115 pages. The subdirectory lec-notes/book collects the lecture notes into book form, including a table of contents. There is a Makefile there that will build the book. I think the files in the book directory may have corrections that are not in the files in the parent directory, but I forget.

• quiz

  Each class, I gave a five-minute written quiz on the material from the previous lecture. For some of these I just asked the question orally, but the ones where there is a written quiz are in the quiz directory.

• hw contains homework assignments and sample solutions.

• midterm contains the midterm exam and solutions with explanations. The midterm was much too difficult.

• final contains the final exam and its solutions.

• Somewhere along the way the students asked me to make up some practice problems for one of the exams. These are in practice.

I plan to release this under a Creative Commons license shortly.

Makefiles, or instructions for building PDF output, or something like that, will also appear here shortly.

WARNING

The lecture notes contain errors! I am aware of several, and there are probably several more of which I am unaware. Corrections are welcome.