CSC 209 exam information

My further office hours

My regular office hours end with the end of classes.

I will be holding further office hours shortly before the exam, specifically on Wednesday August 17 from 16:00 to 17:30 in BA 3218 (we may move to a larger room, in which case I'll put a note on my door).

If you can't make those times, or if you want to see me prior to that date, please send e-mail and we'll see what we can do.

And, of course, you can always send questions by e-mail. Many programming problems are most easily discussed by e-mail. Copy and paste entire .c files into e-mail messages so long as they're a couple hundred lines or less; copy and paste error messages into e-mail messages. (Don't e-mail me pictures of text, please. Copy and paste the text itself, not a picture.)

The exam

The exam covers everything in the lectures, videos (excluding optional videos), assignments, and labs, except as excluded below. If you've missed some lectures, meet someone else in the class and get copies of their notes. The exam is "cumulative". The format is much like the midterm, but longer (3 hours allowed, although it oughtn't take most people the full three hours).

All paper "aids" are allowed: books, notes, etc.
No electronic aids are allowed: No computers, calculators, wristwatches which can run unix, electronic diaries, pagers, cell phones, ...

NOTE that the "no electronic aids allowed" rule is a very strict rule. If you take out a calculator or mobile phone or MP3 player, you will be summoned to the Dean's office for an academic offence hearing. Please be careful: either don't bring these devices to the exam at all, or leave them (switched off!) in a backpack or similar at the side or front of the room.

The same goes for any communicating with other students during the exam, even if it's not about course material (there's no way for us to know!). Be careful not to communicate with other students during the exam in any way.

And despite being an open-book exam, most of the other usual restrictions are still in force; for example, you may not have a pencil case at your exam desk. Like any U of T exam, such things also need to go into your backpack or coat pocket or similar, away from your desk.

Valuables in a sufficiently small container, such as a purse, can alternatively be placed on the floor underneath your chair, so long as the container is closed (zipped up), and it's right under your chair, not beside it or under the desk.

Exam timetable

The exam will potentially cover:

software tools principles, stdin/stdout, inheritance of stdin/out, writing software tools and filters, command-line options, getopt().
shell programming in "sh": i/o redirection, parentheses, pipes, use of variables, command-line substitutions, use of backquotes, basic commands, control constructs (if/for/while/etc), use of /dev/null
the unix filesystem
the C programming language (basic syntax, functions, extern, simple printf/scanf, pointers and arrays, simple C preprocessor, argv, strings, files, structs, separate compilation)
C memory allocation ("malloc"), C data types
processes, fork/exec/wait/open/close/dup2, pipe()
process states (blocked versus ready to run)
inter-process communication: signals, sockets, IP addresses and port numbers, network byte order and network newline convention
all of the assignments and labs, excluding the 'Makefile' bit in lab 05.

I do mean "potentially" — obviously a three-hour exam can't be comprehensive over this range of material.

Other matters which are in the course (to varying extents) but are excluded from exam coverage:

"Makefile" syntax
other TCP services; X windows connection mechanisms
details about memory management, the process table and such, and context switching (multitasking implementation)
concurrency stuff; Dijkstra's P and V; the "dining philosophers" problem; deadlock
posix threads
unix and internet security

BRING YOUR STUDENT PHOTO ID CARD. You will have to put it face up on your desk.

Problems

Please see an index into some sample problems regarding the CSC 209 course material. Many of these problems are too hard for midterm or exam questions, but I think that they are all good practice problems.

There are also several former exams of mine there, and there are some other exam problems in a supplementary lab.

Also please see https://www.teach.cs.toronto.edu/~ajr/209/asmt-more.html for some further work you could do on the assignment problems if you like.

Like mathematics, computer programming can only be learned by doing. Don't just review your notes; do problems, write programs, test your programs, debug your programs.