Course Notes - Jim Fawcett
Revised: 01 December 2007
"
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
"
- Jim Horning
Notes:
The infrastructure for this site - the collection of its pages and linking structure - is just about complete.
However, the goal of the site is to organize a dozen years of notes, presentations, demonstration
code and reusable code modules. Not all of that organization has happened yet. But content
organization is starting to blossom for most of the courses. If you navigate to
AllPages
you will find a map showing where content can be found.
Jim Fawcett, Ph.D.
Part-Time Associate Professor
CST 2-187, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244
(315) 443-3948, jfawcett@twcny.rr.com
Purpose of this Site
The site serves, for current and former students, as a portal into a sequence of
software design courses I've taught for the last twelve years. This page links to
descriptions of each of the courses and to folders containing presentations and code
used as an integral part of these courses.
Using code and notes from this website:
-
May I? - Yes, you may use any code and notes you find here for the classes covered by this site. It is my intent
that you use whatever you find useful to help with your project assignments. For other courses you
must check with the instructor of that course.
There is a standard courtesy protocol you should follow (and should follow regardless of the source of the code).
If you change anything, even a single character, put your name as the author and list the original author as the
source. You thereby take responsibility for any breakage that you have caused to the code, and irate users will
descend on you, not on the innocent original author. If you don't change anything then leave the original author
citation.
-
How? - The easiest way to access code is with FTP. Unfortunately, that is available only on campus or using the
vpn client provided for registered students at www.its.syr.edu.
For all former students, I am slowly putting zip archives in the various code folders, so that you can get the
entire contents simply by using the "save target as" selection on the right-click context menu in Internet Explorer.
If you don't find a zip file and are a former student, send me an email and I will put the archive you want in its code folder.
Courses
I teach software design courses on a regular schedule, each offered once each year:
Courses
Course Handouts
You will find a collection of directories on the college server to provide access for
current and former students to selected notes, references, and code. Be warned
that the code is discussed in class and much of it will have meaning, only to
that class. However, feel free to browse, and download anything you wish:
Handouts. You will find links and
descriptions of much of the code here.
These folders have more content than a simple directory organization can properly
support. This site is trying to provide a grand scheme for improved
accessibility. The site is now in its third year and its contents and structure are reasonably current.
Master's Projects and Theses
The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has three programs: Computer Engineering,
Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering.
Of these, the two Engineering programs require completion of a Master's Project as a final
step in your academic experience. If you wish to complete a Master's Project under my direction
please check out Master's Projects. If you are interested
in carrying out some original Master's-level research follow this Yellow Brick Road.
Research and Development
Several students and I have recently started a small research group that focuses on
software complexity, accessibility and reuse. For details refer to this
Research page.
This group consists of a couple of Doctoral students, several students preparing Master's
Theses under my direction, and a number of students doing Independent Studies. Some of this research
extends into the classroom. Recently (Fall '02), for example, the
CSE784 - Software Studio class developed
a Software Foundry that implements some of the software
accessibility ideas we are exploring.
Ancient History
From 1978 through 1990 I taught, as an Adjunct, all Electrical Engineering courses, e.g., a variety of control system
courses, digital signal processing, complex variables, linear vector spaces, etc. None of those notes
are in electronic form, and so do not appear in this site.
