Language and design recipes

In 1998, I taught this course in the Java programming language, and found that we spent far too much of our time on level-1 and level-2 knowledge, with not enough time left for levels 3 and 4. So in 1999 I started in the Scheme language, which has simpler rules of grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary and is easier to use, and switched to Java for the second semester. It worked well -- indeed, I think the students who switched from Scheme to Java came out with a better understanding of Java than those who started in Java from the beginning -- so we'll do much the same this year.

We'll pay a lot of attention to design patterns, which are step-by-step ``recipes'' for getting from a vague English-language description of a problem to a working computer program. Last year's students tended to skip the recipes when they were in a hurry, and invariably found themselves wasting more time as a result. To prevent this, you will be graded on, among other things, how well and thoroughly you use the recipes.