The official web site for this course is located here.

This page contains general information about the conduct of this course.  See links on the Overview page for more specific information.

Broken Links:

Occasionally one or more of the links, which tie these online, documents together may become accidentally broken.  If you discover a broken link, or any other problem with the online documents, please notify me as soon as possible so that I can repair the problem.

Communications via Email

I receive several hundred email messages every day. Many of the messages that I receive contain viruses or worms. Most of the rest are SPAM.

Therefore, whenever you send a new email message to me, you MUST use the Blackboard "Send Email" feature to construct and send the message, and your Subject line MUST contain a brief description of the topic. (Don't simply reply to an earlier email message from me if the topic is different.)

When I see that format, I will trust that the message is safe to open and read. Otherwise, I will assume that your message contains a virus or constitutes SPAM, and I will simply delete your message without reading it.

Questions via Email:

From time to time you may need to ask questions via email, and I encourage you to do so.  However, please make the question as specific as possible. For example, "What is OOP?" is not a question that I can easily answer via email.

If you, like many others, procrastinate and save your questions until the day before an assignment or test deadline, don't be surprised if you don't get a response from me until after the deadline has passed.

I am usually happy to answer questions about Java programming concepts at the level of this course. However, please don't ask me to tell you how to write the program for an assignment. It is almost certain that I won't do so. It isn't fair for me to provide information about how to write an assignment program to one student when all students don't have an opportunity to hear the question and the answer.

When appropriate, please illustrate your question with a short sample program.  When you send a sample program, please observe several important rules:

• Don't send isolated code fragments.  Send a complete program that is ready for me to paste into a java file and attempt to compile.
• Make the program as simple as possible while still illustrating your question.  Eliminate all superfluous code that isn't necessary to illustrate the question.
• Make it an application rather than an applet, unless an applet is required to address the specific question.

I normally respond to student email messages within 24 hours except on weekends. If you send a message to me and you don't receive a response within 24 hours (allow 72 hours on weekends), make certain that your Subject line is correctly formatted and send the message again.

Help me debug my program

Please don't waste our time by asking me to help you debug your programs.  The best way to debug is to avoid errors in the first place.  Then there won't be any bugs that require attention.

If you understand the requisite programming concepts, the only bugs that you will incur will be the result of careless errors on your part.  I won't waste my time showing you how correct for your own carelessness.

Failure to Meet Prerequisites:

Please don't ask me to teach the Introductory or Intermediate Java Programming material to you.  If you don't already understand that material, it will be your responsibility to learn it, on your own, without assistance from me.

Carelessness is costly

On June 29, 2001, which was the last Friday of the month, and was anticipated to be one of the most active trading days of the month, programmers working on a network made a careless error and shut the NASDAQ stock exchange down for several hours.  There is no way of estimating how much this cost various people around the world.

In the Spring of 2003, programmers working for a telephone company made a careless programming error and swamped the 911 emergency call center in Austin with wrong numbers for several hours.  Hopefully no one died as a result, but we will never know.

Although careless errors on your assignments may not be as costly as the errors described above, they are costly nonetheless.  In fact, the cost for making a careless error on a programming assignment is just as costly as not knowing how to write the program in the first place.  In either case, you get no credit for the program.  So, don't be careless.

-end-

File: GeneralInformation.htm