1 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.

2 Style Guide

All code, documentation, and papers written for this course must conform to the course style guide:

The section on the "Development Environment" below includes a discussion of tools that you can use to ensure that your code is styled correctly.

3 Sharing Code with the Professor

If you only need to share a couple of files, the easiest thing to do is to email them to him as individual attachments.

If there are more than a few files, you can email them to him by attaching a .zip file. However, remember that you must change the suffix to .jmu or it will be stripped-off by the JMU email system. This is best done from a command shell because file explorers have a tendency to hide file extensions.

4 Saving Lab Worksheets

You can, of course, print your lab worksheets. But, you can also:

5 Electronic Submission System (Gradescope)

This course will be using Gradescope for the submission of programming assignments and parts of exams. General help using Gradescope is available at the Gradescope Student Center.

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

6 Installing and Configuring the Development Tools

The "Tools" page lists the development tools you must use this semester. Help installing these tools is available at:

7 Using the Development Tools

Of course, getting the development tools installed is only the beginning. You will be much more productive in this courses if you become familiar with your operating system, the IDE, and other tools you'll be using. If you need help, you might want to look at the following documents:

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

8 Course Topics/Learning Outcomes

Obviously, a great deal has been written about the topics covered in this class. If you're looking for help (or just for more information) you might want to look at the following:

9 Background/Review

There are many places you can go to get help on the things you covered in the prerequisite(s) to this course. The following local resources might also be helpful.

10 The Oxford English Dictionary

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