COMP2100/2500 Software Construction
Paced programming exercises — Homework 2010

this is the 2010 version, likely to be updated for 2011

Quick Homework Menu

1. revision: array ordering
2. prime factors
3. line counter
4. writing 1-3 digit numbers as words
5. writing larger numbers as words
6. sorting integers using a binary tree
7. making change
8. commonest words part 1
9. extract from an archive
10. commonest words part 2
11. GUI
12. shell

Explanation

Weekly homework is an important part of learning and self-development in the COMP2100/2500 Software Construction courses. The homework exercises are not given any assessment marks. However before you decide that you will save time by not doing the homework, consider this:

Clearly you are free to collaborate on the homework exercises as much as you like. My recommendation, however, would be to make a serious effort to do the homework by yourself. A good idea would be to set aside a particular time each week for homework. Then when you have completed it, you could get extra value from it by comparing your solution with other students and discussing the differences. There is almost no benefit from looking for other people's solutions (or my sample solutions, if available) before trying it seriously yourself: you just cannot improve your programming skills that way.

Aims

1. To provide you with an opportunity and an incentive to do regular programming, thus improving your skills.

2. To provide an opportunity for you to learn and practice the PSP.

3. To help you practise the use of version control every time you code, so it can be as natural as breathing.
   

The initial aim some years ago was just #2 above: practise PSP. The idea was that there is little point in doing the PSP on challenging programming tasks that cover completely new ground for you. While you are learning new skills there is no point in recording your time and trying to learn something from the statistics. You have a much better chance of learning something from the PSP while carrying out routine programming tasks — ones that aren't a major challenge involving new concepts and techniques. The idea is that the homework programs should be relatively straightforward. Your challenge is to write them well, in a reasonable time, with as few defects as possible and to learn to predict your own process.

But it is also true that in 2002—2007 many students found that doing the homework tasks helped them to improve their programming skills quite dramatically. What we had expected to be easy tasks turned out to be rather difficult at first for many students, but by mid-way through the semester their skills had improved to the point where they were much more confident and capable programmers. If you are weak in Java programming at the start of the semester, look at these weekly programming exercises as an opportunity to turn that weakness into a strength.

The exercises v3: 2010

Here are the homework exercises, some estimate of size of the solution, and recommended test methods (in some cases).

Notes and references

1. NCNB: "non-comment, non-blank" - an indication of the actual code size of a source program file, counting the lines which are not comments and not blank. If the program has a standard layout of statements and other constructs this is a fair measure of comparable size. NCNB gives a smaller count than is measured by LineCount (homework-05) because it excludes all comments.