Computer Science II
Contact Information
Course Overview
Prerequisites
Schedule
Lab Times
Office Hours
Calendar
Lecture notes
Lab materials
Homework
Test reviews
Textbooks
Web Resources
Drop in Tutoring
Homework
Due Date and Time
Late Day Policy
Compilers
Electronic Submission
C++ Development
Cygwin
Emacs
Dev C++
MinGW
Important notes
If your output does not agree with the output provided on the course
web site, use of the cygwin "diff" command could help you spot the
differences. (Linux, FreeBSD and Mac users also have "diff" in their
command shells.) It is important to try to get the output to be
identical or nearly in order to help us with grading. It will help
you ensure that your program does work, at least on the data we
provide.
To see how to do this, for HW 1 you could download the results.txt
from
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/spring07/cs2/hw/01/results.txt
Put results.txt in the same folder as your output file. Open Cygwin,
change your current directory to that folder and type
diff results.txt your_ouput_file_name
where "your_ouput_file_name" is the name of your output. The result
of this will be the line-by-line differences between the two files.
The diff command is very picky. For example, it marks two lines such
as
"apple"
and
"apple "
as different because there is an extra space after the 'e' on the
second line. This helps you spot subtle differences that your eyes
might not notice.
If you would like more information on using diff, type "man diff" in Cygwin shell. You can also do a web search to find other explanations.
Homework Due Date and Time
Assignments are due Thursday nights at 11:59pm. Submission will be electronic and submission times will be judged from the timestamp given by the web server; that is, our clock, not yours. If it is one minute late, it is a day late, so we suggest that you don't actually wait until the last minute. You may submit your assignment multiple times; we will only grade your last submission. Please see the Calendar for the homework assignments and due dates.
Homework Late Policy
Each student will be given three days (whole or partial) of grace for late homework assignments. These grace days should be used carefully, and no more than two may be used for any one assignment. Once the late days have been exhausted, late assignments will not be accepted without a written excuse from the Dean of Students. For example, if student X submits his/her 1st assignment 26 hours late, X will have used two late days and have only one day left. If X then submits another assignment 5 hours late, X will have used his/her last late day. If X then submits a 3rd assignment 1 minute late, it will not be accepted. Students should use their late days carefully, saving them for the latter part of the semester or (better yet) not using them at all.Compilers
You may do your programming work for this course with any C++ compiler and development environment you wish, but your submitted homework code must compile and run under gcc 3.4.2. The homework submissions server will attempt to unzip your submission and compile & run your code with gcc 3.4.2. It will inform you of any compile, link, and runtime errors or warnings.We understand that many of you will be using the Microsoft Visual Studio compiler and development environment. We are asking you to write portable code so we can significantly streamline the grading process. This leaves more time for us to give constructive feedback on programming style, individual tutoring, and debugging help. If the grader must spend time editing your files in order to compile or run your code, you will not receive full credit. You will have practice using the submission process during the first lab. Please see a TA in office hours if you need additional help writing portable code.
Electronic Submission
Make sure you read and follow the Academic Integrity statement which applies to all Homework Assignments. Once you've finished writing, testing, debugging, and commenting your code, prepare your assignment for submission as described below. This will pack together and compress your hw1 directory and all of the files it contains. (Replace hw1 with hw2, etc. as appropriate.)- If you're using Cygwin/Linux/FreeBSD/UNIX, go to the top-level
directory for your homeworks and type:
zip -r hw1_submit.zip hw1
- If you're using Windows, use WinZip to create a new archive named hw1_submit.zip and then drag & drop your entire hw1 folder into the archive.
Next click the submission link below. You will need your RPI login & password to access this page. Select the appropriate assignment, and then use the browse button to select the zip file you just created and press the "Send File" button only once.
You will either get a message confirming your submission or an error message advising you of a submission requirement you failed to adhere to. If you find a mistake in your homework, you can fix it and re-submit using the same procedure. We will only grade the most recent submission. Please ask a TA if you need help preparing your assignment for submission. Do not submit any other type of compressed file format or you will not receive full credit.
Note: If there's lots of "stuff" in your homework directory the zip file may be too big for submission. (Visual Studio makes lots of big temporary files.) Either manually delete this extra stuff OR make a new folder and copy just the necessary files to that folder for submission.