Practice of Programming

This course focuses on programming techniques related to the most important activities of software development, namely, low level design, coding, debugging, and testing. In particular, the course would emphasize on techniques that would enable the students to write high-quality code for large and complex software. The techniques would be essential to achieve the required level of scalability as well as quality associated with the correctness, security, dependability, performance, portability, and maintainability of programs.

 

Students learn about programming concepts and language features in their basic courses on programming. These courses typically focus on programming constructs such as primitive data types, arrays, pointers, and structures, and on data structures including linked lists, hash tables, and trees. In addition, they introduce students to object oriented programming and its features including classes, objects, collections, inheritance, virtual dispatch, exception handling, GUI, threads etc. These courses prepare students to work on class projects, programming assignments, and small applications. However, building large and complex applications of commercial scale is a fundamentally different challenge. It requires much deeper understanding of programming language features as well as programming techniques to achieve the required level of scalability and quality associated with the correctness, security, dependability, performance, portability, and maintainability of programs.