CS 257: Software Design

Spring 2017

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Class Notes

Thoughts on improving the course next time

Week 1

Two tools, a perspective, and a habit

• [Due 11:59PM 3/29] The tools: IntelliJ and git
• [Skim by 3/31] 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. Read enough to understand the core idea.
• [Skim by 4/3] The habit: Test-driven development (TDD). Ditto the comments on User-Centered Design.
• [Read by 4/3] Sections 1-6 and 14-17 21-22 from The Pragmatic Programmer. Bring to class a list of 3-5 ideas you find interesting or insightful or useful, and 1-2 ideas you disagree with or have questions about.
• [Due 11:59 PM 4/3] Unit Tests for TTT3D

Week 1.5

Start learning vim or emacs in a terminal. Every programmer should know how to use one or both of these venerable editors. They're both old, extremely widely available, and very powerful.

• vi (pronounced VEE-EYE) dates back to the 1976, and is my editor of choice. Its modern versions are usually referred to as "vim" (for "vi improved", pronounced VIM). There are tons of tutorials, including a vim-learning game, a kind of gamelike tutorial, and lots of short introductions.
• emacs also originated in 1976, and is typically associated with the GNU Project. Though vim is powerful, emacs has greater aspirations, with its "e" standing for "extensible." You can work with emacs as just a text editor, but you can also use its extensions to make emacs be your IDE/home-base/terminal/.... I'm not an emacs user (I tried in the early 90s, and it hurt my left wrist, so I went back to vi), so I'm not expert at the huge variety of things you can do with it. But again, there are many, many tutorials on the subject, including the official GNU Emacs guided tour, this "absolute beginner's guide", etc.

Week 2

Code quality, regex, and a visitor

• [In class 4/5] Playing with regular expressions
• [Due 11:59 PM 4/9] Implementation for TTT3D
• [By class time 4/10] Read The Commento, from Code Complete, by Steve McConnell

Week 3

Using HTTP-based APIs. Getting started on the web application.

• [Due 11:59 PM 4/12 and 11:59 PM 4/14] Using HTTP-based APIs
• [Read by 4/17] The Guiding Principles section (i.e. Chapters 1-5) of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Revisited (3rd edition)
• [Read by 4/17] Section 10 (Tracer Bullets) of The Pragmatic Programmer

Week 4

Intro to usability. Implementing HTTP-based APIs. Getting started on databases.

• [Due 11:59PM Tuesday, 4/18] The Web App, Phase 1
• [Due 11:59PM Monday, 4/24] The Web App, Phase 2
• [Nothing due] Getting started with PostgreSQL

Week 5

PostgreSQL from Python using psycopg2. Flask. HTML and CSS.

• [Due 11:59PM Sunday, 4/30 Wednesday, 5/3] The Web App, Phase 3
• For Phase 3, you may find this handy: my Flask-based implementation of my books and authors API
• Getting started with Flask

Week 6

Midterm break, HTML, CSS.

• [Read by 5/5] Sections 22 (Dead Programs Tell No Lies), 23 (Assertive Programming), and 24 (When to Use Exceptions) from The Pragmatic Programmer.
• [In class 5/3] Here are three profoundly ugly HTML/CSS example pages: example1.html, example2.html, and example3.html. Learn the content, but please don't emulate the ugliness.
• [Due 11:59PM Wednesday, 5/10] Have a functioning draft of the Web App, Phase 4 ready in your repository and running on thacker, and share your repository with your tablemates in advance of Wednesday's code reviews.
• [Before class, Friday, 5/12] Prep for the code reviews, as described in the Web App, Phase 4.
• [Due 11:59PM Monday, 5/15] Submit your final Web App, Phase 4, taking into account the feedback you got in Friday's code reviews.

Weeks 7, 8

Usability. JavaFX. Design patterns.

• [By class time Monday, 5/22] Read these these excerpts About Face 3: Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin. It's about 75 pages total, so get started early. Be ready to talk about the main themes: user goals, mental models, excise and navigation, experience level (beginner/intermediate/expert), posture, etc.
• [Due 11:59PM Monday, 5/22] Sprites

Weeks 9, 10

MVC, final project, miscellaneous

• [Due 11:59PM Monday, 5/29] Final project, phase 1: description and architecture.
• [As soon as possible] Read about Design Patterns in general, and the Observer Pattern and the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern in particular. All of these topics are described by innumerable bloggers and youtubists out there (e.g. this MVC explanation is probably clearer than the Wikipedia page). We'll continue to discuss these ideas in the coming week.
• [Optional] If you want to (and have time to) go a little deeper into object-oriented design, try this tutorial, which does a pretty clear job of explaining the object-oriented design principles known as SOLID. Watch out, though--some of the earlier code in the tutorial (e.g. for the explanation of the "S" in "SOLID") has some serious design problems that are only fixed when considering the later principles.
• [Due 5:00PM Monday, 6/5] Final project, phase 2: the end! You may find it useful to explore the code in my simple Pong program in my github repository.