CSCI 102 sec. 4 and 6: Data Structures, Fall 2014
"I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
Linus Torvalds, 2006
Joanna Klukowska
Clinical Assistant Professor,
Computer Science Department,
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences,
New York University
Email address
Mailing address
Warren Weaver Hall, Room 423
251 Mercer Street
New York, NY 10012
Office hours
Tuesdays 11:00 - 12:30
Wednesdays 12:30 - 2:00
Current courses
CSCI 101 sec. 5
CSCI 102 sec. 4
CSCI 102 sec. 6
Tweets by @joannakl_nyu
Textbook(s)
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(REQUIRED) |
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Open DSA - online eBook |
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DO NOT SELL YOUR CS101 BOOK JUST YET! |
Other textbooks available through BobCat library (OPTIONAL)
Data structures using Java by Duncan A. Buell, online version available here
Schaum's outline of data structures with Java by J. R. Hubbard, online version available here
Data structures and algorithms for game developers by Allen Sherrod, online version available here (this book uses C++)
Data structures and algorithms using Java by William McAllister, online version available here
Prerequisites
Passing CSCI.UA.0101 with a grade of C or better.
You are expected to know and remember the material from CSCI.UA.0101 course. If you took the course a few semesters ago and/or do not remember parts of the material, start reviewing it during the summer break.
Grading
Your grade will be based on
- exams (70%): one midterm exam (30%) and the final (40%),
- three to four large programming assignment (20% total)
- other homeworks (10% total): mostly weekly or bi-weekly.
Assignments
There will be two different types of assignments in this course: homework assignments and programming assignments.
Homework assignments (10% of your final grade) will be given on a weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) basis. In general, they will be due
one week after
they are given. They will consist of short answer questions that may ask you to write a code/psudocode fragment, read some code and
determine its output, describe what happens to a given data structure after a series of operations has been applied to it,
etc. They will not require you to submit complete programs, although it might be beneficial for you to write code and run it
yourself to check correctness of your answers.
Each homework assignment will consist of three (3) questions/problems. The homework assignments will be graded out of
6 points. You will receive
one (1) point for each question just for attempting to answer it (if you write anything that seems to be related to
what the question asks for). You will receive two (2) points for each question answered correctly (or nearly correctly).
The complete solutions to the problems will be provided during the recitations (they will not be posted on the website so
make sure you attend the recitations). The types of questions will be similar to the ones that you will see on the midterm
and final exams.
There will be three to five (3 to 5) programming projects (20% of your final grade) during the semester. In general, they will be due two-three weeks after
they are assigned. The programming projects will require you to submit programs consisting of several classes that may take
several days to design, develop and test. You should start working on these as soon as they are given.
The programming projects will be graded out of 100 points.
Late and missed assignments:
- Homework assignments:
Late homework assignments will not be accepted. The lowest grade on the homework assignment will be dropped.
- Programming projects:
You get one "freebie" programming project - you can hand it in up to one week late without
penalty. Make sure you save the "freebie" for when you really need it. When you want
to use your "freebie", you need to send me an email stating so before the project's due date.
Any other projects that are not submitted on time, have to be submitted within two days (48 hours) after the original due date. Such late projects will receive only 80% of the points assigned to the same submission that was received on time (this means that a perfect project submitted two days late is worth only 80 points).
Broken programming projects: If you hand in a program that does not compile or crashes when it is run, you will get a grade of zero on it (so it might be worth your while to submit it two days late and fix it, rather than submit a broken program on time).
Challenging an assignment or a project grade:
You can challenge your grade on any assignment or project. To do so, you need to come to see me during the office hours, or schedule
an appointment.
Academic Integrity Policy
I use MOSS (a system for detecting software plagiarism) to make sure that the submitted assignments are not duplicates of one another. Your code has to be your own.
I follow the department's
academic integrity rules.
In short, it is fine to talk to other students about your ideas and your programs, but it is not fine to work together on
assignments or copy someone else's assignment. You cannot copy other people's work without giving them a proper credit (and
part of your grade).
You may discuss any of the assignments with your classmates (or anyone else) but all work for all assignments must be entirely
your own unless a group project is specifically assigned. Any sharing or copying of assignments will be considered cheating.
By the rules of the College of Arts and Science, I am required to report any incidents of cheating to the department.
If you have any doubt if something that you are doing qualifies as academic dishonesty, talk to me!
Exams
There will be a midterm and a final exam. All exams are cumulative, although they will have larger emphasis
on the new material covered since the previous exam.
On all exams you will get to choose which questions (one or two) you do not wish to answer. There will be no extra credit
for answering all questions.
Missing an exam: There will be no make-up exams. Failure to take an exam counts as a zero grade on that exam. The only exception to this rule is for students who have a legitimate medical or personal emergency (documented). These students need to talk to me as soon as possible (trying to excuse an exam absence three weeks after it happened will not work).
The type of questions you should expect to see on the exams is the same type of questions you will see on homework assignments.
Topics Covered
This is a tentative list of the topics and their order:
- Intro to the course. Object oriented programming in Java: classes, objects, Inheritance, polymorphism. Reading: Class notes, DJW ch.1, Liang book.
- Recursion. Reading: DJW ch. 14, Liang ch. 20.
- Exception handling. Reading: Class notes, Liang book.
- Merge sort, quick sort (optional) and performance analysis. (Dale, Joyce, Weems, chapter 10)
- Exception handling. Writing your own exception classes. Catching ALL possible exceptions. (Liang, chapter 14 + notes)
- Comparable interfaces. Sorting: review of quadratic sort algorithms. Searching: sorted and unsorted data. Reading: DJW ch. 10, Liang book.
- Generic methods in context of sorting. Merging two generic arrays. Reading: Class notes.
- Merge sort, quicksort. Reading: DJW ch. 10
- Abstract classes and interfaces, abstract data types (ADT). Reading: DJW ch. 2
- ADT for list, stack, queue. Array-based implementation of lists, stack and queue. Reading: DJW ch. 3,5,6
- Generic classes. Reading list: class notes.
- Linked list based implementation of lists, stack and queue. Advantages and disadvantages as compared to array-based implementation. Reading: DJW ch. 3,5,6
- Algorithms: prefix, postfix, infix notations and evaluation. Reading: DJW ch. 3
- Midterm Exam
- Linked lists in different flavors: singly linked vs. double linked and other varieties. Reading: DJW ch. 7
- Iterators. Reading: class notes
- Trees: different types of trees, different types of traversals. Reading: DJW ch. 3,5,6
- Binary trees and binary search trees. Reading: DJW ch. 8
- Binary search trees: operations (iterative and recursive versions). Reading: DJW ch. 8
- Trees: performance analysis. Reading: DJW ch. 8
- Optional (if time permits):
- Hash tables: different types of conflict resolution, different choices for hash functions. (Dale, Joyce, Weems, section 10.6 + notes)
- Balancing binary search trees and self-balancing binary search trees. (Dale, Joyce, Weems, section 8.8 + notes)
- Priority queues and heaps. (Dale, Joyce, Weems, chapter 9)
- Final Exam
For detailed schedule, see the Daily tab of this page.