hwxi

Teaching

I primarily teach the following courses at BUCS:

Introduction to Programming (DS) (CS112)
Concepts of Programming Languages (CS320)
Compiler Design and Implementation (CS525)
Principles of Programming Languages (CS520)

Spring, 2025

I am scheduled to teach BU CAS CS392 in Spring, 2025. Note that this class is designed to be a faster-paced version of CS112. Please read the slides for more information.

How to proceed?

There will be a placement test given.
Please take it if you are interested. We will send out invitations based on the quality of the submitted solutions to this test.
Note that the class time is not yet fixed. Here are some possibilities:
- Tuesday/Thursday 09:30am-10:45am
- Tuesday/Thursday 11:00am-12:15am
- Tuesday/Thursday 05:00pm-06:15pm
- Some other times in case none of the above work out

Title

Introduction to Programming (Data Structures)

Overview

This course starts by quickly revisiting and then building upon basic programming concepts in Java. Then, the main focus of the course is on the design, analysis and implementation of fundamental data structures used throughout computer science. These include linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, hash tables, graphs, as well as specialized methods for searching and sorting. All of our implementations will be in the the object-oriented programming language Java. The emphasis in teaching this course centers around the following:

Developing elegant and efficient code from an abstract specification;
Literate programming (writing programs that can be read by humans as well as machines);
Developing a toolbox of advanced data structures for use in your future programming tasks, and an awareness of various design patterns that recur frequently in advanced programming;
Critical thinking about programs and the programming process, which involves:
- Thinking about the best way to plan out the design using object-oriented design and appropriate features of Java;
- Methodical and efficient development of the implementation using step-wise refinement and incremental testing and debugging (using appropriate debugging tools);
- Being able to convince yourself of the correctness of the implementation by mathematical reasoning;
- Analyzing the running time (efficiency) of programs by inspection and mathematical reasoning; and
- Evaluating the efficiency and correctness of programs empirically, by using various tools in properly designed experiments.

Syllabus

(For now, please see an old syllabus used during Spring, 2010)

Logistics

Classroom: TBA
ClassTime: TBA
Piazza Link: TBA
Class Repository: https://github.com/hwxi/CS392-2025-Sprn

Grading Policy

First and foremost, if you are not sure about what is being asked to do, please seek clarification on the Piazza page.

If you feel that your work is not fairly graded, please raise your concern to me ASAP. If you don’t, then I could not tell. In general, grading tends to be interactive in the sense that you may receive feedback on your code and then be allowed to fix bugs if there are any.

Prerequisites

Some basic familiarity with programming in general:

CS111 (Introduction to Programming in Python)
Some basic knowledge of Java is expected of you

Textbooks

Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, Princeton University.

Programming Languages

Java