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ITU
Introduction to Programming – Concepts and Tools (E2005)

Introduction to Programming – Concepts and Tools

Purpose

The goal is that, after the course, the successful student has obtained the following practical and theoretical skills:

1. the ability to understand the basic concepts of object oriented programming languages, such as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, including knowledge about how these concepts are syntactically realized in Java
2. the ability to write small structured and well-designed programs in Java to solve given tasks; for this purpose, student will be using simple data types, variables, arrays, conditionals, loops, methods, recursion, classes, and objects
3. the ability to write programs that make use of simple input and output
4. the ability to use APIs and to understand the functionality of Java classes, based on their documentation and understanding of the concepts of interitance and interfaces, incl. signatures of methods, and exceptions
5. the ability to understand the concept of algorithms and to use general problem solving techniques, including basic searching and sorting algorithms, complexity of algorithms, and divide and conquer algorithms using recursion

This course covers the prerequisites for more advanced programming courses, such as the course „Object Oriented Programming“.

Contents

Programming is one of the fundamental ingredients in IT and computer science. Most courses in IT requireat least basic, if not solid, programming skills. The course provides an introduction to this area. We will cover the concepts of procedural programming and basic concepts of object oriented programming. In particular we will cover the following topics (not necessarily in this order):

• the programming process
• variables, basic data types
• arrays
• control structures
• functions (procedures, methods)
• classes, class structure, encapsulation, inheritance
• polymorphism
• exception handling

We will also see how these basic programming constructs are realized in the language Java. In addition to the above topics we will cover the following Java-specific topics:

• Java I/O (input and output)
• Java packages

On the algorithmic side we will introduce basic searching algorithms for unordered and ordered lists anddiscuss the notion of complexity of algorithms. Sorting of data is another fundamental task done by computer programs. We cover the standard algorithms, such as selection sort, bubble sort, and quick sort.
Example programs and exercises will deal, among others, with strings and string handling, graphs, and (elementary) mathematics.

Result

Passed february 2006 given the grade 10 and 7.5 ECTS points.

Litterature

Ira Pohl, Charlie McDowell; Java by Dessection – The essentials of Java Programming.
(2000, Addison Wesley – ISBN 0–201–61248–8)

Assignments

All assignments have passed :-)