George N Rouskas -- CSC 316

CSC 316: SYLLABUS

The information on this page pertains to the Summer 2013 DE Section 651 of CSC 316.

Prerequisites

Students who wish to take this course must be CSC majors who have received a grade of C- or better in both CSC 216 (Programming Concepts with JAVA) and CSC 226 (Discrete Math).

The purpose of this course is to introduce the principles and underlying concepts of algorithm design, and enhance your problem solving and software development skills. To this end, a wide range of practical techniques for manipulating data in digital computers will be presented, along with a mathematical analysis of their performance.

At the conclusion of the course you should be able to:

complete moderately large programming projects independently, and code modules of larger projects;
define abstract data types to subdivide a large problem into smaller, manageable subproblems;
select for a repertory of commonly used data structures the ones most appropriate for the application at hand;
effectively implement the abstract data types learned in class (or the ones you design yourself);
evaluate the relative performance of alternative data structure and algorithm designs for a given problem, in terms of their asymptotic running time; and
explain and feel confident about your approach to the solution of a given problem, and its implementation.

I encourage and expect you to participate actively in the learning process. In particular, I welcome your comments and questions as we cover material in class. One-way lectures quickly become boring, both for you and for me. By asking lots of questions your understanding of the material will be deepened significantly, and the course will be much more fun!

Outline

The course will cover a wide range of data structures and associated algorithms, including:

Properties of programs, running time, and asymptotics
Array and linked-memory implementations of lists, stacks, and queues
Searching using lists, unbalanced tree structures (binary search trees, Splay trees) and balanced trees (2-3 trees, randomized binary search trees)
Up-trees as sets with union-find operations
Graphs and graph algorithms (traversals, shortest paths, minimum spanning trees)
Sorting (heap sort, merge sort, insertion sort, selection sort, quick sort)
Hash tables and hashing techniques

Textbook

Students are required to purchase the following textbook:

M. T. Goodrich, R. Tamassia, Data Structures and Algorithms in JAVA (5th edition), Wiley, 2010

The authors maintain a webpage with useful resources.

I will also make available an extensive set of lecture slides.

Reading List

Grading

Students are required to complete all assignments and show all work in order to receive full credit. The final grade will be determined using the following weights:

Four programming tasks (10% each)	40%
Five homework assignments (2% each)	10%
Two tests (closed book, 15% each)	30%
Final exam (comprehensive, closed book)	20%

There will be several opportunities for extra credit throughout the semester, including the projects and exams

Policies

Attendance is not mandatory but strongly encouraged. Students are responsible for making up any course material they miss.

No hard copies of assignments or solutions will be handed out. New assignments and solutions will be announced in class and/or the course mailing list, and will be available on the course web page.

Students must submit their assignments as PDF or Word files using the submit facility. The deadline for submission is midnight (Eastern time) on the day due. Any deadline extensions are up to the discretion of the instructor, and will be announced to the whole class. Extensions may be provided to individual students under extenuating circumstances.

No late assignments will be accepted and no partial credit will be given for late assignments without a valid excuse.

Homework and projects are individual assignments and students are required to submit their own solutions. All students are bound by the University's academic integrity policies (refer to the relevant section below).