Welcome!

Welcome to the pages for the second semester of the First-Year Software Workshop (for the first semester pages, click here). This course brings together all of the practical work for the Computer Science/Software Engineering courses in the School of Computer Science.

The aim is that you will learn to take problems and build good systems that will tackle these tasks.

To build a good solution you need to be able to do more than just hack together a program that sort of solves the problem. You should also:

Early exercises will concentrate upon the skills of programming, but later you will work in groups and analyse existing solutions (including each others). The later exercises will be larger and will require extra skills.

Each week a new practical exercise will be set and made available on-line from the quick link to Exercises in the bar to the left.

The bar to the left is a list of links which lead off to the various course-related documentation that you will need. You are expected to explore these links as the course progresses. There are quick links to the Java documentation you will need, recommended books for the course and a short introduction to newsgroups. There are also several FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) which are maintained by people on your course:

You are free to add your own questions (and answers) to the FAQ pages.

You are also encouraged to make use of the course newsgroup, cs.courses.sw1. This is a group for discussion of any issues relating to the course. If you have any questions, hints or other comments then they can be posted here and will be readable by the course tutors and other students. You'll probably find this one of the best ways to get help and advice outside of the lab sessions.

Add this page to your web browser's bookmarks. This will let you return here quickly without having to retype the address.


Page maintained by Stuart Reynolds
Last modified: Thu Dec 9 11:48:07 GMT 1999