Performance and Test, Fall 2007: Resources

Lab exercises

Peter Tiedemann has written a Lab Guide on setting up your environment for the lab exercises, Eclipse, JUnit, etc. (click on this link). Please study this carefully - it has most of the answers you need!

Java

The following material may assist you in programming assignments if you choose to use Java, which is strongly recommended in this course:

• A Danish introduction to Java
• The official Sun tutorial
• Java for Windows, Linux and other platforms can be downloaded from this homepage.
• For Linux users, Linuxlab offers a note under a cryptic title "Exercise 10: Getting started with Java programming in Linux". It is very useful in getting the initial environment set up, first program written, compiled and executed.
• On OS X, Java can be run off the command line a la Linux. Alternatively, the freely available developer environments include BlueJ and Xcode among others.
• We recommend using the Eclipse development environment for Java. It can be downloaded from an ITU local server (Windows version). Installation is easy: Unzip into some reasonable place and run the executable eclipse.exe. Eclipse is widely used in industry and a de facto standard when developing software in Java. It has very many features and it takes some time to learn to use it, but it is a powerful development tool worth the effort. Several of the important topics of the course are integrated as elements in Eclipse: for instance, JUnit (for unit testing) and CVS (for versioning).
• The Introductory Programming Course offers the following list of resources on Java programming.
• Peter Sestoft's notes Text Files in Java, Java Performance, and his book Java Precisely

Object Constraint Language

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) used in [MS] is defined in "Object Constraint Language, Version 2.0, May 2006" from the Object Management Group (OMG). Read Chapter 7 for a good overview.

Supplementary math literature for performance part

If you want to refresh your mathematical skills please read this note first. This is not a part of course curriculum. Rather it sets the requirements for what you are supposed to know when starting this course.

As a supplement we recommend some additional mathematical background in the book Data Structures and algorithms in Java, by M.T. Goodrich and R. Tamassia. In Danish there is a book called "Grundlæggende matematik for dataloger" which are used at DTU, it might be useful as well. The two books has not been read thoroughly by the teachers, but[A at first look they seems to be good. There is also a list of math books for the conoisseur.

Other supplementary literature

Martin Fowler's article on the Fail Fast principle.

Other useful links

• Old IADS exam questions with solutions.
• The Computational Logic and Algorithms Group