Computer Science 420 - Spring 2010

last updated April 26, 2010

This page is a course resource for Beth Katz's Spring 2010 section of CS 420 which meets Mondays and Fridays (10-10:50) and Wednesday (10-11:45). Classes are in Roddy 147.

Instead of a textbook, we will use a variety of resources. There are many books and web sites that have a lot of useful information. No one book covers the material the way we do. So I decided to not require a textbook.

Major Resources

Assignments

There will be some individual assignments. These will usually not be coding. They will include writing short technical papers, proofs of correctness, algebraic specifications, and testing.

Specifications due 10am Monday, April 5th; 75 points; Stack as RTF Stack as PDF
JUnit testing due noon Tuesday, March 30th; 100 points; Statistician Javadoc
Student Schedule due 10am Friday, January 22nd; 25 points ( Microsoft Word ) ( PDF )

Reading Assignments

Instead of a textbook, we will use a variety of resources. There are many books and web sites that have a lot of useful information. This is a summary of the complete reading list that also has references for the original articles.

Prelude to Boehm and Turner's Balancing Agility and Discipline (informit.com)
Steve McConnell's Software Engineering, Not Computer Science
Preface to The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
consider Use case modeling tips by Scott Ambler
skim through Parnas's Faking It paper
Parnas's Module Criteria paper
Wikipedia entries for Fred Brooks's Mythical Man-Month and No Silver Bullet

Team Project

The term-long team project will be written by 4-5 person teams that I will assign with your input. You will use Java 1.5 and Swing within an integrated development environment such as Eclipse or NetBeans. The objective here is to apply software development techniques in developing high-quality software. We are focussing on the process of developing the software. You will complete it in three iterations of roughly one month each. It will need to work cross-platform and will be an application rather than an applet.

Project Tool Links

Most Useful Resources

Links Related to the Course

Software Engineering Links

SE Online a reviewed resource center for software engineering (glossary at top)
SWEBOK Software Engineering Body of Knowledge
FAQs of comp.software-eng some questions and answers of software engineering terms
Extreme Programming: A Gentle Introduction
History of Iterative Development
Law of Demeter OOD style guideline
Object Mentor's Bowling example of test-derived extreme programming
Risk Management Overview from SEI
Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems current news and archives
Steve McConnell's Software Engineering, Not Computer Science
Roger Pressman has excerpts from his many books.
Pragmatic Software Development Tips by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas - short snippets of good ideas
Don't Live with Broken Windows A Conversation with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

UML (Unified Modeling Language)

Class Diagrams:
- UML basics: The class diagram by Donald Bell
- Artiso Visual Case
- Object Mentor (PDF)
UML Diagrams:
- Scott Ambler's list (handed out March 3)
- Scott Ambler's less formal description
- Donald Bell's more formal description
- Trace Modeler tool to create them

Design Patterns

Michael Mahemoff's patterns and other great ideas; his book on Ajax Design Patterns
Brad Appleton's design pattern history and resources
Douglas Schmidt's design patterns in context of CS course (case studies)
JavaWorld's design patterns articles (more depth; longer real-world examples; search on pattern name)

Books

Head First Software Development, Dan Pilone and Russell Miles, 2007. ISBN 0-596-52735-7
Balancing Agility and Discipline, Barry Boehm and Richard Turner, Addison-Wesley, 2004. ISBN 0-321-18612-5. You may see snippets of this book at informit.com including the Prelude which is given in its entirety.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissades (Gang of Four), Addison-Wesley, 1995. ISBN 0-201-633612.
Head First Design Patterns, Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman, Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates, 2004. ISBN 0-596-00712-4
Object-Oriented Design and Patterns, Cay Horstmann, Wiley, 2005. ISBN 0-471-74487-5

Programming Links

Eclipse development environment
NetBeans development environment
Eck's Online Java Text
Sun's Java classes documentation
Sun's Java tutorials
Sun's Swing tutorials
SGI's C++ Standard Template Library reference
XML.com
Michael Mehemoff's Ajax tutorial

Other Computing Sites

Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing
Retrocomputing Museum lots of solid but sometimes bizarre computing history
DeCSS haiku of how to decode a DVD expressed as haiku poetry, but this site provides more background and context

Pages from Previous Semesters

Spring 2009 page and Spring 2006 page and Spring 2005 page

[ Beth Katz ] [ CS 161 ] [ CS 162 ] [ CS 330 ] [ CS 362 ] [ CS 420 ] [ Millersville CS ]

Beth Katz, katz@cs.millersville.edu