Topic outline

  • Materials

    Course materials and exercises are available in TIM system. Materials are available in English and Finnish. Important: Use Haka login and your Aalto account when logging in to TIM.

    This page has information about different C compiling tools you can use on different platforms.

    A traditional book about C programming is "The C Programming Language" (2nd edition), by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. 

    Comments on course feedback

    Summary of the course feedback is provided in below pdf file. Here are some comments on them:

    • The exam arrangement was taken rather positively, although some well-justified criticism was also presented. We will continue developing the exam arrangements further to address the shortcomings, but it seems we are on a right track.
    • Many people found the workload too large. This is familiar comment also from previous years, and we had tried to reduce the workload of most difficult rounds for this year. According to the collected round feedback, 75% of students used less than 10 hours per round, which is on target regarding intended workload, but it is understood that a programming course can be felt quite cumbersome, compared to some other kinds of courses. Especially the project was causing stress for some, also because it happened to coincide at the same time with exam week (unintended oversight). We should probably try to start the project earlier in future.
    • Exercises being crowded caused some comments. Mostly the exercise sessions were less crowded than in earlier years, probably because we have reduced the workload of the course, but there were still some busy times especially on the difficult rounds and during the project. Lack of queue system was pointed out: it is not because we could not implement it, but because the vision has been that the exercises are intended to be more teaching sessions than a ticket system. To facilitate the interactive teaching aspect, In future we might consider moving part of the exercises out from the traditional computer classes into more comfortable learning spaces, because most students use own laptops for exercises.

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Exercises