2. General Advice

This course requires you to develop small-scale software, but asks you to write that software in a style that is appropriate for larger pieces of software. Here are a few key pieces of advice in developing software for this course.

  1. This course will offer you ideas for developing software that have been found by experience to be of critical importance. Do not ignore that advise, no matter how appealing ignoring it seems. You will come into this course developing software like a novice. Make sure that you do not leave the course the same way.

  2. Strive for simplicity and clarity. Many of the errors that students make is because they choose complicated solutions to simple problems.

  3. Never submit software that you have not tested. Never make a change, no matter how trivial, and then submit your work without testing it again.

  4. Do your own work. If you do not do the work then you will not get the education that you are here to get. When you graduate, you will regret that.

    Plagiarism is not limited to copying an entire document. If a significant part of your submission was written by somebody else, you have plagiarized. Plagiarism is much more obvious than you might think, and it is not acceptable behavior.

  5. Consult the notes on grading programming assignments. If you don't, you will likely lose a lot of points that you could easily have avoided losing.

  6. Lastly, from Mark Twain: Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.