Welcome

Welcome to CC 410 - Advanced Programming. This course is designed to be a capstone experience at the end of the Computational Core program, building upon our prior knowledge and experience to help us become a truly effective programmer. In this course, we’ll not only learn new skills and techniques, but we’ll try to pull back the curtain and explain the history of programming and why we do some of the things we do.

Big Ideas

In this course, we’re going to cover a lot of content. However, it can be grouped into a few big ideas in programming:

• How can we write professional looking code that is easy for others to understand?
• How can we effectively debug and test our programs to minimize the number of bugs?
• What is object-oriented programming, really, and why is it so popular?
• How can we develop programs that have a graphical user interface (GUI)?
• What is event-driven programming, and how does it relate to the development of GUIs?
• What are some common design patterns that we can use in our code?
• How can we interface with applications on the Internet?
• How do we design and develop our own programs from scratch to solve a particular problem?

We’ll spend some time covering each of these in more detail as we go through the course. In this module, we’ll start working on the first two - writing professional code and minimizing bugs through testing and debugging.

Getting Started

Before we dive too deeply into this topic, let’s take a step back and examine some of the history of programming that lead to our current state of the art that revolves around object-oriented programming. To do that, we’ll need to explore the software crisis and the topic of structured programming.