Requirements for Basic Concepts in Programming

Contact: Professor Jürg Gutknecht

The requirements for "Programming" cover the fundamental concepts of software development as detailed below. The exam for this course is a programming exam (detailed below).

Programming basics

• Notions of program, class and other modular units
• Notions of variable, data type and pointer
• Elementary data types, structured data types
  
• Statements and control structures
• Notions of interface and implementation

Programming techniques

• Structured programming
• Procedural programming
• Object-oriented programming
  
• Separation of interface and implementation

Fundamental data structures and algorithms

Operational familiarity with basic data structures and algorithms such as arrays, lists, binary and other trees, sorting, searching, branch-and-bound.

Programming languages

Operational knowledge of at least one of the following languages: C/C++, C#, Java, Pascal, Eiffel.

Programming exam

This exam is designed to verify the basic knowledge and skills of programming and of using programs for problem solving. The requirements roughly correspond to the level of an introductory programming course in a typical Bachelor's program.

The aim of this exam is to test your ability to solve a given problem by choosing a suitable algorithm & data structure and by writing a small but well-designed program in a concrete programming language.

The resulting programs must be written in concise and compact form on paper in either of the languages mentioned above. Solutions will be assessed according to the suitability of the approach taken and to the correctness of the resulting program.

The assessment takes the form of a 4-hour programming exam. For the date and time of the next exam see the general page about Foundation courses.

Recommended background reading

• (English and German) Wirth, N., Algorithms and Data Structures = Programs, Prentice Hall
  
• (English) R. Sedgewick, Algorithms in Java, 3rd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2002.
• (German) T. Ottmann & P. Widmayer: Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen 4. Auflage, Spektrum Verlag, 2002, also at www.ti.inf.ethz.ch/pw/ottmann-widmayer/
• (English) T. H. Cormen, C. E. Leiserson, R. L. Rivest and C. Stein: Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition, MIT Press, 2001.