CS 257: Software Design

Fall 2014

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Samples

Class Notes

Week 1

Two tools, a perspective, and a habit

• [Due 11:59PM 9/17] The tools: IntelliJ and git
• [Skim by 9/22] The perspective: User-centered design (UCD). The core idea here is very simple, but as you'll see from the Wikipedia article, it has accumulated a lot of formalism.
• [Skim by 9/22] The habit: Test-driven development (TDD). Ditto the comments on UCD
• [Read by 9/19] Encoding: Unicode, UTF-8, and UTF-16. The keys here are to know what these three things are, and to know how UTF-8 is constructed.
• [Due 11:59PM 9/22 9/24] Unit tests for EncodingHelper

Week 2

Functional and command-line interfaces

• [Read by 9/24] High-Quality Routines from Code Complete, 2nd edition by Steve McConnell.
• [Due 11:59PM 9/29] Final version of EncodingHelper

Week 3

• [Read by 10/6] The Guiding Principles section (i.e. Chapters 1-5) of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Revisited (3rd edition), You might want to start this before doing your mockups for the assignment due 10/4.
• [Due 8:30AM 10/6] First phase of the web applicaiton

Week 4

Postgres and the web application

• [Due 8:30AM 10/13] Second phase of the web applicaiton
• Setting up a simple database

Week 5

CSS, Javascript, more web application

• [Read by 10/17] The Commento, from Code Complete, by Steve McConnell.
• [Read by 10/17] Assert Yourself, from Writing Solid Code, by Steve Maguire, up through page 21 (which is about 9 pages total). This is a chapter from an old book (1993), and its code examples are in a peculiarly Microsoftian version of the C language, but the core ideas here are still powerful. The chapter is long and technical, and the whole thing is worthwhile, but the key ideas are introduced in the first 9 pages.
• [Due 8:30AM 10/24] Phase 3 of the web application

Week 6

Wrapping up web apps. Code reviews.

• This might be helpful: a Python unit testing intro
• [Be ready at 8:30AM 10/27] Code review for the web application

Week 7

Code reviews and revisions. Intro to Java GUI development.

• [Due 5:00PM 10/31] Final revision of your web application

Week 8

Design Patterns. JavaFX.

• [Read by 11/3] Chapter 1 (Introduction), Chapter 2 (A Case Study), and the Strategy section of Chapter 5 (Behavioral Patterns) of Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Be ready to discuss: What is a design pattern? What are they for? Why would you want a catalog of them? What's confusing about this chapter? etc.
• [Due 11:59PM 11/4] Sprites: a brief introduction to JavaFX
• [Read by 11/7] Read the sections from Design Patterns on the Observer and Singleton patterns. Also, read about the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern. There are many good discussions of this very important pattern, including this one with code samples in PHP, and this one that focuses on web apps. This one in C++ is good, too.

Weeks 9, 10

Final projects and miscellaneous fun

• [Due 5:00PM Tuesday, 11/11] Final project, phase 1
• [Due 11:59PM Friday, 11/14] Final project, phase 2
• [Due 5:00PM Monday, 11/24] Final project, phase 3
• My MVCDemo and Sprite IntelliJ projects are now here.
• Here's a super-bonus lab exercise. Spend your break learning about threads!

Reading Days

Office Hours, all in CMC 324

• Thursday, Nov 20, 9:00-11:30
• Friday, Nov 21, 12:30-2:00
• Monday, Nov 24, 9:00-11:00