CS10, 09S, First Midterm Exam

• practice problems
• The actual exam

What is covered

In general:

• Chapters 1-6, emphasizing the parts we talked about in lecture, on the homeworks, and on the programming assignments lab00, lab01, lab02

More specifically:

• Definitely: the basic idea of writing a class in Java with constructors, getters, setters and a toString method.
  • The ideas of instance variables, methods, parameters.
• Declaring variables in Java, e.g. int x;
• Declaring variables that are references, and initializing, such as:
  Student s = new Student("John", 1234567);
• Writing unit tests in JUnit (simple ones)
  e.g.

   public void testConstructor() 
   {
  
    Student s = new Student("John", 1234567); // name and perm
  
    assertEquals("John",s.getName());
  
    assertEquals(1234567,s.getPerm());
  
   }

• simple if tests, else (Sections 5.1, 5.3)
• simple for loops, while loops (as in the practice problems) (Sections 6.1, 6.2)
• anything else that was on the homework, lab assignments, or covered in lecture that I didn't mention here.

Here's a few additional topics that I didn't mention in class on Monday but are definitely covered by that last item (the anything else item above)...

A good way to study some of these is to look at the homework problems, your lecture notes, and also the "self-check" questions in the textbook (answers to those are in the book.)

• The compilation process (Section 1.8 in your text)
• The idea of Object references in general (2.10 in your text)
• Categories of variables (3.7 in your text):
  • instance variables
  • local variables
  • parameter variables
• The this variable (an implicit parameter), (3.8 in your text)
• primitive types and type casting (4.1 in your text)
• assignment statements, increment/decrement operators (++,--), and order of operations (4.3 and 4.4 in your text)
• calling static methods (e.g. Math.sqrt(25.0)), from Section 4.5 in your text
• Strings (4.6 in your text)
  • For this exam, you should know: declaring strings, using string constants, the .length() method, and using + for string concatenation.
  • We'll defer coverage of the substring() method to Midterm 2
• if/else (Section 5.1, 5.3)
• relational operators (<, >, <=, >=, ==, !=) (Section 5.2.1)
• special concerns with testing floating point numbers for equality (5.2.2)
  • subtract, and check if the absolute value (Math.abs()) is less than some small value (called tolerance, or epsilon)
• special concerns with testing Strings and Objects for equality (5.2.3, 5.2.4)
  • The difference between thisString == thatString, vs. thisString.equals(thatString)
• predicate functions (Section 5.4.2) —boolean functions that typically have names starting with is or has, like myBankAcct.hasZeroBalance(), or myBankAccount.isOverDrawn().
• The boolean operators && and || (Section 5.4.3 of your text)
• DeMorgan's law (Advanced Topic 5.5 on p. 209 of your text)
  

Some things I won't cover on this exam, but which might be on Midterm 2

• Using Math.round with long variables and using the class BigInteger and BigDecimal (from section 4.1)
  • This isn't hard, but we just never talked about it or practiced with it. I'll try to correct that before Midterm 2.
• Binary numbers (from section 4.1)
  • These will definitely be on Midterm 2, along with octal and hexadecimal.
• using final with constants (from section 4.2)
  • Again, not hard, but we didn't practice with it yet—we'll fix that before Midterm 2
• The substring method from 4.6
• Reading User Input (Section 4.7)
  • The Scanner class and its methods
• Formatting numbers (Advanced Topic 4.6)
• The switch statement (Advanced Topic 5.2)
• enumerated types (Advanced Topic 5.3)
• The do while loop (Advanced topic 6.1)—though regular while loops are on this exam
• Nested Loops (section 6.3)—we'll practice with these with some homework problems before midterm exam 2
• Processing sentinel values (Section 6.4)—we'll practice with these on some programming assignments before midterm 2
• The graphics sections—this will definitely be on Midterm 2 though:
  • 2.11G, 2.12G, 2.13G
  • 3.9G
  • Advanced Topic 4.7 (input dialog boxes)
• The sections in Chapter 6 on Debugging
  • 6.6T, 6.7T