COMP-3356 Details

COMP 3356 - C/C++ Programming

Course description

This course provides an introduction to programming in C, designed for students with some Python programming (COMP-3005 and COMP-3006, ideally). Topics covered include C based:

• Source to binary, compilation, assembling, linking
• Data types and arithmetic operations
• Program input and output
• Logical operators and conditional expressions
• Iterative constructs (loops with conditionals)
• Functions and argument passing
• Nested loops and recursion
• References and pointers (pass by reference)
• Memory allocation - the stack and the heap
• Arrays and lists, C strings
• Structures and basic classes
• File based input/output
• Intro to debugging programs
• Common programming security issues

Course learning objectives

After completing this course, successful students will be able to:

• Take a concrete programming problem statement and translate it into a program to solve the problem.
• Create a source file from scratch, compile it, and execute it.
• Identify and implement program constructs to concisely solve the problem (loops, logical operations and arithmetic).
• Know how to allocate and de-allocate computer memory programmatically, and where that memory is stored.
• Use correct types for variables and comprehend their different representations.
• Utilize built-in types for storing data items (e.g., C-style arrays and lists)
• Build simple data structures (structs and classes) for organizing more complex variables.
• Be able to read and write input and output to and from a program, either using user input (stdin/stdout) or files.
• Understand safe/unsafe functions and common types of programming errors (buffer over/underflow, numerical overflow, format string errors, double-free, use-after-free, etc.)