Slide 1.5: Guidelines of programming exercises

Slide 1.4: A generic structure of a database-driven web system
Slide 1.6: Why this course
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Guidelines of Programming Exercises

The guidelines of programming exercise construction and evaluation are as follows:

Two programming exercises, file- and database- driven web systems, will be assigned.

Each exercise may have a different weight based on its difficulty level.

The programming exercises are team exercises.
- Each team consists of three members.
- Form your own team as soon as possible and send the names of team members to the instructor.
- If you are not able to find your team members, the instructor will randomly group a team for you eventually.
- All team members will receive the same exercise grades.
- Once a team is formed, the team members can not be changed unless teams are merged.
- For some reasons, if the team consists of only two members, the team could merge with another team to form a three-member team or the team needs to get ¾ of the remaining exercises done. The ¾ of the remaining exercises will be defined by the instructor.
- For some reasons, if the team consists of only one member, the team could merge with other teams to form a two- or three- member team or the team needs to get ½ of the remaining exercises done. The ½ of the remaining exercises will be defined by the instructor.

The exercises will not be graded if they are not located at
```
     http://people.cs.und.edu/~userid/351/
```
and redirection (http-equiv="refresh") to the pages not hosted by http://people.cs.und.edu/~userid/ is prohibited. That is, you can only use the facilities provided by the public Unix servers at the Aerospace School to complete your exercises.

This course will focus on C/C++. Most of the course materials, code examples, and code given by the instructor for exercises will be C/C++ because of the following reasons:
- C/C++ is the most popular language used these days.
- We will also spend more time on introducing C/C++. Therefore, this is the good chance for you to enhance your C/C++ knowledge or learn C/C++.
- The most important reason we study this course is to improve the system performance and C/C++ is known for its efficiency and low-level instructions.
- It is an object-oriented language, which is used by large system implementation.
- The textbook uses C/C++.

Though team exercises always cause much controversy, team exercises instead of individual exercises are still assigned because of the following reasons:
- It is requested by the department for meeting the requirements of ABET, which include short reports and presentations/demonstrations.
- The exercises could be large.
- Students learn how to manage group exercises and member relationships.

Exercises need to be put on the Web because of the following reasons:
- If the system is not web-enabled, it still requires graphical user interface, which is usually more difficult to construct compared to web interface.
- The instructor can easily grade and check the exercises.
- It is a trend for information systems.
- It is good for your programming experience.