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General information about CS 31/32

Q. How hard is CS 31/32?
A. It is not that hard if you do your part the right way: go to lectures and stay focus (instead of doing something else or sleeping), attend discussions, and follow our advices. In general, the CS 31/32 class is NOT hard compared to other CS classes (it’s pretty much the first class in CS, and it is lower-division, how could it be harder than other CS classes?). It seems hard because it could be your very first class at UCLA or your first class in our CS department. And coming from high school (or other colleges), you don’t expect the workload to be this high. As you go along and cope with the workload, the class is very doable (or quite easy, in fact).

Q. How time consuming is CS 31/32?
A. It is quite time consuming because the projects will take 5-20 hours to finish (especially the last project could take around 40 hours to finish). And you have roughly 1 to 1 and a half week for each project. You will definitely run into problems and get stuck. Hence, starting early will give you more time to seek help from the professor or TAs.

Q. How hard is it to compete for the top grades in CS 31/32?
A. Most of the CS classes will be graded on a curve (that means doesn’t matter how good your score is, only some percentage of the students get A, followed by some percentage of B, etc.). However, in CS 31/32, from my experience, if everyone does great, everyone will get an A.

How to write a report

• No essay style
• Organized (headers, bullet points, etc.)
• Clear / Short / to the point

How to do well in this class

1. Follow our trivial advices (and yet, some people will find these are too trivial that they decide to ignore them). Please don’t learn the lesson the hard way. Your fellow students did, and they proved their point with their grades barely made it to a D-

• always start early. If you finish your 1st and 2nd projects within 1 hour, that definitely does NOT mean that the 3rd project will be of the same level. Do NOT wait till the last day (or even the day before the due date) to start working on a project. The difficulty of later projects will be 10x of earlier ones.
• develop incrementally, this means to write your code step by step
  • write a few lines of code, or a function
  • compile your code, fix any compile errors if needed
  • test those lines of code or that function, fix any runtime errors if needed
  • repeat

2. READ the spec, READ the spec again, and READ the spec one more time

• 1st time you read it: skim through it, get a general idea of what the project is about (after reading, you should know the main things you’re expected to do)
• 2nd time you read it: get into the details (after reading, you should be able to go straight into coding)
• 3rd time you read it: double check the details (you should be working on the code right now, and looking at the spec for something you might have missed or overlooked)

3. Always start something

• whether to create an empty Project in Visual C++
• or to set up empty files with the correct names you’re supposed to name them
• or to have a skeleton framework of your project set up
• or to copy/paste the given code in the spec to your files
• or to write the pseudocode which later will become the comments of your code
• or to start working on the report
• or to think about the test cases

What kind of services do the CS labs offer?

Our SEASnet computing facility is very good (in my opinion). We have 4 labs, all located in Boelter Hall. During the 10th week of a quarter (before the final week), if I recall correctly, the labs are open till 2am in the morning.

If you want to work from home, and your computer doesn’t have the software you need. You can connect to the SEASnet remotely, and use the software available on the SEASnet machine, right on your computer at home.

You get FREE Microsoft softwares (notably, Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista Business, a $100-$300 value). A downside is there is no Microsoft Office. Just download the Operating System (OS), and install it on any of your computer for FREE. Or you can download the Professional version of the Visual Studio (a $1,000 value) instead of using the free Express version that we told you to get for CS 31/32 (it might be overkilled to use the Professional version though).