1 Course Content

The Department has a group of teaching assistants (TAs) that are available to provide help on programming assignments. Their hours and the process they are using are both described on the Department's Wiki.

In addition, they run something called "The 4th Hour", which is a student-led walkthrough of CS149 topics. Note that since the different sections cover material on different schedules, you need to make sure that the topics being covered in any given week are relevant to you.

2 Course Materials

Different professors have different thoughts about teaching and learning, and one professor may even approach different courses differently. The following documents will help you understand the ways in which different kinds of materials are used in this course.

3 Style Guide

As explained in the course "Policies", all code written for CS149 must conform to the course style guide.

In addition, avoid the use of the space character in file and directory/folder names because the space character is commonly used as a delimiter.

4 Electronic Submission System (Autolab)

This course will be using Autolab for the submission of programming assignments and parts of exams.

Prof. Bowers has created a video on how to register for Autolab that you may find useful. NOTE: If you don't register before I create the roster for the course, you will need to click on "Forgot your password" instead of "Register".

In addition, help is available on the Department's Wiki on the following topics:

Finally, if you're curious about how Autolab determines if a password is strong enough or not, you can read the description of zxcvbn. Personally, I just tried a few different passwords that used a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters.

5 Development Environment (jGRASP and Checkstyle)

Getting your development environment setup can be a little difficult. This semester, the difficulties are exacerbated because we can't work on it in close proximity to each other. So, many of the people teaching CS149 have created instructions that might help. They are all listed here so that, if you have no luck with one set of instructions, you can try another one.

If all else fails, you can get help from the TAs (see above).

Of course, getting the tools installed is only the beginning. You will be much more productive in this courses if you become familiar with your development tools, operating system, and associated command shell(s). If you need help, you might want to look at the following documents that were prepared for this course.

If you need additional help, you might want to consider the following:

6 The English Language

Of course, you need to understand the things you read. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a tremendous resource in this regard. It is available on-line at: