Slide 2.1: Programming exercise guidelines

Programming Exercise Guidelines

This course is programming intensive and three programming exercises will be assigned:

The guidelines of exercise requirements and evaluations are as follows:

General Specifications

Students have to demonstrate their exercises to the instructor individually so misunderstanding would be minimized. The instructor will prepare a set of test data to be used by all students. An appointment is needed in advance.
(Zoom at https://und.zoom.us/j/2489867333 may be used for demonstration.)

Because of the limited resources provided by the College, fundamental tools such as CGI will be used for exercise construction. Though basic tools instead of fancy ones are used, it is believed that almost all functions of Web-enabled database projects can be completed by using these basic tools. If students are interested in web programming, check CSCI457 Electronic and Mobile Commerce Systems.

Students have to post their code online so the instructor can download and execute it on his own computer if any suspicion.

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.
- In addition, remote work is a trend for IT workers. This course also allows you to learn how to do it by using the VPN (virtual private networks) to connect to our Linux server undcemcs02.und.edu, and having the exercises set up at the server and be accessed from the clients.

Exercises have to be located at the following URLs, respectively:
and redirection (http-equiv="refresh") to the pages not hosted by http://undcemcs02.und.edu/~user.id/ is prohibited. That is, you can only use the facilities provided by the public Unix/Linux servers at the College of Engineering to complete your exercises.

Comments
Few comments are about the programming exercises:

According to a study, students in computer courses learn much more by building large-scale exercises instead of many small-scale test programs, which give fragmented knowledge contrary to solid understanding of the system.

Time management is critical for software development. If you are not able to complete the exercise, display whatever you have accomplished, so the instructor can give partial credit to your exercise.

Web, mobile, and database programming is a must for IT developers, and the only effective way to learn software development is practicing, instead of studying concepts or writing some testing programs.
No pain, no gain 😂

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