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CMSI 185 Computer Programming
Preparation for Final Exam
To be held 2009-05-05T1100-0700
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The final exam will run from 1100 to 1300.  It will be open
everything --- the only rule is that you cannot solicit help,
nor look at or take pictures of anyone else's exam, etc.
You can not give help either.

The questions on the exam will be fairly similar to the questions
on the two quizzes, namely matching questions, hort answer
questions, questions asking you to find errors in code,
and questions asking you to write code.

Everything in the textbook from

  * Chapters 1-4
  * Chapter 5, sections 1-4
  * Chapter 7, Sections 1-3
  
is fair game for exam questions.  You might wish to read
the text, if you haven't already.  Even if you've kept up 
the reading, it would not hurt to review.

Keep in mind, though, that the author's code is very often
not up to professional standards.  Sometimes this is intentional
as he is trying to teach certain programming constructs early
in the text, when readers have not yet gained sufficient
programming experience to do things the right way.  But
sometimes the code is just plain poor or non-conventional.
Be wary of

  * declarations which fail to initialize
  * overuse of statics
  * silly comments at the end of methods
  * ridiculous abbreviations like rollCt
  * A custom TextIO class when plain ol' Scanner and
       System.out would be fine.
       
To best prepare, reread or skim the relevant textbook
chapters, go over all of the homework and quiz solutions,
and work out the end of chapter exercises and programming
problems at the end of each textbook chapter.
Look over some of the practice problems at
http://www.cs.lmu.edu/~ray/classes/cp/practice/ and try your
hand and some of these if you have time.  Review the
Learning Objectives from the syllabus.

But remember, the final exam questions will look a lot like those
from the quizzes, so make sure you understand all of the quiz
answers.