Imperative Problem Solving (Section 02)

Instructor

• Dawn Nye

Meeting Times

• MWF 2:30–3:50pm in Noyce 3815

Office Hours

• By appointment (Noyce 2811). Let me know the day before you want to meet (or earlier), and we can make something work. I also keep late hours and will usually answer Teams messages and emails late into the night.

Textbook

• C Programming: A Modern Approach by K. N. King (Second Edition)

Mentors

• Almond Heil (section 01)
• Ellie Seehorn (section 02)
• Lydia Ye (section 03)

Mentor Sessions

• Th 7:30-8:30 in Noyce 3821

Evening Tutor Hours

• Sunday, 3–5pm and 7–10pm in Noyce 3813 and 3815
• Monday–Thursday, 7–10pm in Noyce 3813 and 3815

About this course

Welcome to the Spring 2024 session of CSC 161: Imperative Problem Solving. In this course, we’ll build on your experience solving computational problems in CSC 151 using a new approach. This course website will be your primary source for the course schedule (which includes readings and daily labs), weekly lab reports, weekly homework, and general course policies listed on the syllabus. This site will be very similar across the three sections of the course, but we may not stay perfectly in sync so make sure you use the website for your section of the course.

This class uses the C programming language, a classic and influential example of an imperative language still in widespread use today. Imperative programming languages, and C in particular, sit quite close to the hardware that runs the programs we write; as a result, solving problems in C requires us to think carefully about the structure of our computation solutions and the resources we use. The reward for this extra effort is that C programs can be extremely fast, and can run on practically any computing device. Building your imperative problem solving skills in C will prepare you for CSC 207: Object-Oriented Problem Solving, Data Structures, and Algorithms. You’ll also be prepared to pick up many of the C-inspired languages on your own, and of course you’ll be better at developing computational solutions that mix approaches from both functional and imperative styles.