Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 3 sessions / week; 1.5 hours / session

Prerequisites

None. No programming experience is required. You should be familiar with the use of Microsoft® Windows® and Word®.

Laptop Requirements

Laptop computers are used for class participation in many lectures. A laptop with at least 1GB of memory running Windows 7/8 is needed to run the course software.

Software

For this course, the following software is required:

  1. Visual Paradigm (VP) 10.2 Community Edition - free download
  2. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express Edition - free download
  3. Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web - free download

Readings

You can share the texts with your homework partner, so each of you needs to get three texts. Obtain either the Bowman et al. (2003) text or the Syverson (2002) but not both, for the SQL language.

  1. Buy at Amazon McConnell, Steve. Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Microsoft Press, 1996. ISBN: 9781556159008.
  2. Buy at Amazon Fowler, Martin. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language. 3rd ed. Addison-Wesley, 2003. ISBN: 9780321193681.
  3. Buy at Amazon Bowman, Judith S., Sandra L. Emerson, and Marcy Darnovsky. The Practical SQL Handbook: Using SQL Variants. 4th ed. Addison-Wesley, 2001. ISBN: 9780201703092.
  4. Buy at Amazon Syverson, Bryan. Murach's SQL for SQL Server. Murach, 2002. ISBN: 9781890774165.
  5. Buy at Amazon McFarland, David S. Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual. O'Reilly, 2005. ISBN: 9780596100568.
  6. Buy at Amazon Anderson, Ross. Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems. John Wiley & Sons, 2001. ISBN: 9780471389224.
  7. Buy at Amazon Green, James H. The Irwin Handbook of Telecommunications. 5th ed. McGraw-Hill, 2005. ISBN: 9780071452229.

Course Requirements

ACTIVITIES PERCENTAGES
10 Problem Sets (4% each) 40
35 Active Learning Exercises (must submit 30 total, 0.33% each) 10
Midterm Exam (open book, open notes) 25
Final Exam (open book, open notes) 25

Extension Policy for Problem Sets

Problem sets are due at noon; they are submitted electronically on the course Web site.

You will receive one penalty-free extension until the following class day at noon per semester. No extensions beyond that will be granted, unless there are repeated or extended medical or family emergencies. We will generally require a note from the dean. See the instructor if this occurs.

Late homework sets submitted after noon and before noon on the next class day, beyond the one free extension, are penalized 30%. Homework sets submitted after noon on the next class day receive no credit, since solutions are posted then.

Makeup Policy for Exams

We don't give makeup exams. Please make sure you are here for the midterm and final exams. You will be excused from the exams for medical or family emergency reasons only.

Policy for Academic Honesty

You will collaborate with your partner to do the homework sets. You may ask other groups for explanations or help but cannot look at or copy any of their work. Homework in 1.264 is a term-long project, and is designed to be a larger scale activity, in which brainstorming and design is often a key component. We encourage you to work with your partner. We expect, however, that you are involved in all aspects of the project. When you hand in material with your name on it, we assume that you are certifying that this is your work and that you were involved in all aspects of it.

Here is an example scenario of how a good collaboration might work: Both of you sit down and together plan how you're going to design and implement the homework. You work together on one or both of your laptop computers. You check after each step to make sure that you both understand and agree on the approach.

Here is an example of an inappropriate collaboration: You send your partner a copy of your homework so far. He or she works on it to complete the parts you had not finished, and he or she fixes a mistake in another part. This is inappropriate collaboration because you were not both involved in all aspects of the work.

You may work alone or with a partner or in a group for classroom exercises done in lecture. If you do the active learning outside (before) lecture, you must do it alone.

Exams are individual work.