Programming Problems and Solutions

Baby Steps

1. Hello, World A simple program to print a message to the screen.
2. Unit Conversions A simple program to convert seconds to minutes, hours, days and years.
3. For Loops Print numbers, forwards, backwards and with skipping.
4. Remainder Find the remainder of an integer division using the modulus function.

Recommended Books for Reading and Reference

• The C Programming Language, Second Edition, by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, Prentice Hall Software Series. A favorite among professionals and students alike going back a few decades. It is a fairly thin book that can be used for learning the language or for reference. It is probably not a good book to learn C if you don't have prior programming experience with a procedural language.
• C++ How To Program, Fifth Edition, by Deitel and Deitel. This is a very popular book for college programming courses. It is a fairly large book and quite detailed and comes with many exercises and tips. It is aimed at learning C++ so there are constructs there that are not available in C but it is generally quite a good textbook. It is a pretty good textbook if this is your first programming language and Elliott (webmaster) thinks that it's the best programming book that he's seen. He used this book in one of his programming classes.
• Applications Programming in ANSI C, Third Edition, by Richard Johnsonbaugh and Martin Kalin.  Elliott thinks that this book is good but not great (he used the book in one of his classes). A look at the reviews on Amazon.com indicate that it isn't a good book for beginners but it does have a completeness for those willing to work though the problems and read the book meticulously. I found that it covers many computer science concepts probably making it good for a class where the students are pretty diligent in reading the texts.
• Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, Fifth Edition, by Kenneth H. Rosen. This isn't a programming book but rather a book on various kinds of mathematics useful in programming and computer science. Many people say that courses using this book are considered difficult but there are things in the book that can make doing programming problems easier.
• Foundations of Computer Science C Edition, by Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman. This book integrates discrete mathematics with the models, concepts and techniques of Computer Science. It can be difficult reading for those just starting out in programming but it does provide an introduction to program performance, stacks, queues, linked lists, trees, etc.
• Computer Organization and Architecture, Second Edition, by William Stallings. This was one of my course texts and Elliott has used it in one of his courses as well. The book is mainly about hardware but also covers instruction sets, integer and floating point representation, some aspects of the operating system interaction with hardware, CPUs and parallism. The current edition is the Fifth so our text is pretty out of date but it still covers a lot of basic concepts that haven't changed that much over time. The Fifth Edition is from 2002 which is a bit of a shame as this wouldn't cover the breathtaking changes in CPUs resulting from fierce competition between Intel and AMD in 2004 and 2005. One of the reasons that I like learning Computer Science in C is that you are closer to the hardware than with a lot of other languages which is why I have a hardware book in the reading list.
• Introduction to Algorithms, First Edition by Thomas H Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson and Ronald L Rivest. A popular course text and professional reference book. The material can be rather difficult for beginners but there are many explanations of concepts and algorithms that even the beginner may run into in a programming class.
• Elementary Linear Algebra, Seventh Edition, by Howard Anton. Problems involving matrices are common as they require some exercise of spatial skills. It is nice to have a reference book available that covers matrix operations and algorithms to solve simultaneous linear equations.
• Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman. Some programming students may be curious as to how compilers work or why there are restrictions on languages or what a process looks like at runtime or the phases that a compiler goes through to compile a program. This book provides much more detail than need to satisfy simple curiousity but it should be enough to satisfy some basic curiousity.
• Operating System Concepts, Third Edition, by A. Silberschatz, J. Peterson and P. Galvin. This edition is pretty old and I'm pretty sure that there is a much more modern edition but this is the one that we have in our library. This can be a book to just read through for knowledge and enjoyment without the reader necessarily understanding everything that's going on. The programmer can probably relate some ideas in programming to constrants on operating systems.

Reading Review List

• Data Structures and Algorithms by Alfred V. Aho, Jeffrey D. Ullman and John E. Hopcroft. I've been looking for a Data Structures book for a long time as I lost the one that I used in a class a long time ago. I think that this book will provide a slower-paced approach to data structures compared to Foundations of Computer Science.
• The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms by Alfred V. Aho, Jeffrey D. Ullman and John E. Hopcroft. This again looks like a slower-paced book compared to some of their other books.

Recommended Websites

• Mathworld at Wolfram Research is Eric Weisstein's website that contains descriptions on a huge number of topics in mathematics. You may find the site useful for getting a quick description on some area of mathematics that you're unfamiliar with. They also have a little area on their front page with daily math news.
• Wikipedia C programming language entry provides a very nice backgrounder on the language and a few links to historical and programming websites.