CS161 – Spring 2007
Exam 1 Study Topics
On the day of the exam, be sure to bring your notes
and your book. The written part of the
exam will be worth 75 points and will be closed notes, closed book and closed
neighbor. The on-line part of the exam
will be open book and open notes (your own only, of course) but still
absolutely closed neighbor! Please note
that although the official “online” portion of the test will only be 25 points,
a large portion of the points in the written section involve writing code
statements and segments. You need to
know your syntax.
Your exam might include the following types of
questions:
Important topics to review:
- Hardware, software,
networks -- terms and concepts (chap 1)
- Program Development
- Programming languages
(levels, evolution)
- The steps involved in
program compilation and execution
- Types of errors,
syntax and semantics…
- The general form of a
Java program and the basic elements of a program (classes and methods)
- Data Types:
- Which are the
primitive data types in Java
- The different data
types and what they can hold
- How to declare
variables of different types
- What types might best
be used to store particular values
- What operations can be
used with the different types
- What are valid
variable names (identifiers)
- Input/Output
- Scanner class,
JOptionPane (showInputDialog, showMessageDialog)
- How to display and
format data of the different types (print, println, NumberFormat,
DecimalFormat)
- Be able to write code
to display data in particular ways
- How to read data of
the different types (using Scanner class and methods to read various
types)
- The different types of
errors that might occur in a program
- How to evaluate and
write arithmetic expressions (operator precedence, etc.)
- Arithmetic operators
and expressions
- Which types can be
used with which operators
- What are the resulting
types of expressions with various types and operators
- Operator precedence
- Casting and promotion
of types in expressions
- Using classes
- Terms and definitions
(class, object, instance, constructor, etc.)
- Creating objects of
various classes (Random, Scanner, String, NumberFormat, JLabel, JPanel,
Color…)
- Using the methods of
various classes (both static and non-static – for example, the static
methods of Math and the non-static methods of Random)
- Enumerated types
- Packages and using the
classes they contain (import)
- Be sure that you understand
the content of the programs that we’ve written in class, labs and homework
assignments.
Study Tips:
The best source of practice is the problems in your
book. Remember that the answers to
the Self-Review questions immediately follow the questions in the book.
Form study groups if possible. Practice doing the problems from the back of
the chapters individually, then compare your answers.
Practice writing and interpreting code segments. The test will be the first time that you
need to do this under time pressure, so be sure that you feel comfortable doing
these things.