CS 373:
Info:
Lectures, Textbooks, Etc
Spring 2010
This course has lectures twice a week. There is also a discussion
section that you have to participate in. You also need to know about
the textbook, how to get copies of announcements, handouts, etc.
Lectures and Discussion Sections
Location and time
of lectures/discussion.
You are expected to attend lectures and discussion section. If you
cannot be there, you must arrange to pick up any handouts or returned
homeworks you may have missed, e.g. by coming to office hours. In
particular, 5% of the final grade is for attendence of the disucssion
sections.
Handouts
Some handouts may be hardcopy and some virtual. Virtual handouts will
available on the lectures web
page.
Announcements
Announcements, homework hints, etc will be posted on the class
newsgroup class.cs373
. Here are instructions for accessing
it. You must read the newsgroup regularly (at least once a
day). Only particularly important announcements will be duplicated on
the course home page. You are encouraged to use the newsgroup to
initiate and participate in discussion related to the class. However,
students should not post solutions or hints to homework problems.
Textbook
The official course text is Introduction to the Theory of
Computation Michel Sipser 2nd Ed., PWS Publishing Company, 2005.
Check out its errata
page, which contains a few substantive (as opposed to stylistic)
errors.
There are only modest differences between the first and second editions.
If you are on a tight budget, a used copy of the first edition should work
ok.
Readings from the textbook will be posted on the lectures web page.
In any case, detailed class notes would be posted to the webpage.
Other helpful books
Other books you may find useful are:
- Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages,
and Computation, by Hopcroft, Ullman, and Motwani, 2nd edition, Addison-Wesley, 2003.
- The 1979 classic version of the Hopcroft and Ullman textbook
- Elements
of the Theory of Computation (2nd. ed.) Harry R. Lewis, Christos H.
Papadimitriou, Prentice-Hall, August 1997.
These texts are on reserve in Grainger Library.
JFLAP
The JFLAP software package which allows you to experiement with finite automata.
More details will be forthcoming.
Using JFLAP to help solve homework problems or check your solutions is
not cheating, unless we explicitly tell you otherwise. However, you
should make sure you also end up learning how to work these problems by
hand, because you'll need to be able to do this on quizzes and exams.