Other meeting times can be arranged

AKA: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcnk9tr8_7hpsr4zg4

Grades and late policy

The points for each assignment, your project, and exams, are on the Assignments page.
The late policy is a one point deduction for each day late (the assignments average 4 points each)
The two lowest grades for exercises will be dropped (textbook exercises and Derby exercises only).

Textbook

The textbook is A First course in Database Systems, 3rd edition.  A copy is on Reserve in Snell Library.  The homepage for the book is http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/fcdb.html
There are various small errors and typos in your book (depending on which printing you have)  http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/fcdb/errata.html

Bird names

Bird names must be used in titling and referring to all assignments.  Birds, also known as class Aves in phylum Chordata in Kingdom Animalia will be matched in size to the size of the assignments.  Such names should be familiar to Linux people, Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope, and to Mac people, Snow Leopard.  Birds are appropriate for a database course, considering the prodigious memory for food storage locations possessed by crows, Clark's Nutcracker, and other Corvidae.

Google Docs, Derby, and email rules - If you do not follow the rules, no credit.  We won't read your handins

I have about fifty students, total, in my two classes. Each class will have about a dozen assignments.  That's too much to keep track of reliably without carefully specified organization and protocols.  You must clearly identify Google docs you permit to me, and all files you will be required to send, and all email.

Standard formats that you must use for identifying your work, illustrated for a hypothetical student, Ms. Nostra Ziploc:

• Google doc title for an assignment and a project:
  
• Ziploc, Nostra CS3200 F09 Assignment 3 "Cardinal"
• Ziploc, Nostra CS3200 F09 Project "Eagle"
• File names for Derby DB folder, a Readme, and a zip file:
  
• ZiplocNostraCS3200F09DB-A8B-Scrub-Jay
• ZiplocNostraCS3200F09Readme-A8B-Scrub-Jay.txt
• ZiplocNostraCS3200F09DBZip-A8B-Scrub-Jay.zip

• Subject line of general email to futrelle.cs3200f09@gmail.com
• Ziploc Nostra - CS3200 F09 [+ more to describe the specific subject of the email]

Equally important is the following:  On and in every document you produce, text or source code, you must include your name, the course, the date, and any other relevant information such as a title for a Google doc or your name as the author in a java source code javadoc comment.  Creating informative file names as described earlier, is only half the story.  Just imagine that I print out one of your Google docs or Java source files.  The filename doesn't appear in what I printed.  If there is nothing written in the file as to who you are and what it's about, then I'm stuck (and so are you!).  If it's in a pile on my desk, and it has absolutely no identifying information, I won't be able to tell it's yours.  Over the years, I've received many papers from students, in hardcopy in the past, with practically no information at the top as to what the document is and whose it is.  The students must have thought I had extrasensory powers. More likely they didn't think much or at all about how I could ever associate the document with them. (This is not unlike the warning that you should always carry your ID with you. The sister of a HS classmate of our daughter was struck by a bus in NYC recently.  She had no ID of any kind with her.  She was in the hospital in critical condition for 18 hours before they were able to identify her.)

Major course pages

Assignments page here

Includes exercises from the textbook, using the Derby database, exams, and your semester project. Organized on a week-by-week basis, with all due dates specified.  All handins (electronic) are due by 11:59PM on the due date specified.

Assignment details page here

Supplements the main Assignments page.

Apache Derby here

The relational database system we'll use, includes details on the Derby assignments.

Project here

Has information about your semester project and its three handins.

Exams here

Information About the quiz, midterm, and final exams (in preparation)

Edit this page (if you have permission) |

Google Docs -- Web word processing, presentations and spreadsheets.