Data Structures: Information for foreign students
(Updated 20.3.2001)
How to take part to the Data Structures course in spring 2001
Only two foreign students expressed some interested to the
Data Structures course before the course started. And that
was too little for an English exercise group.
Now there are five who have asked for taking part to the course.
There are some problems:
- The course material in WWW is in Finnish, and it is not clearly
based on any book, neither English nor Finnish.
- The exercises are based on this unique Finnish material.
Some parts of the course are, anyhow, related to a book written
in English:
Mark Allen Weiss: Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in Java.
Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.
My suggestion is:
The English speaking students are allowed to take part to the two
examinations of the course:
- Monday 12.3., 15-19, Porthania I
- Wednesday 11.4., 16-20, Main Building, hall 1
And I can make questions in English, based on named chapters of
the Weiss' book. All the 30+30 points are gathered from the
examinations;
The Finnish students get 25+25 and 10 from the exercises.
What to read in the Weiss' book
The contents and style of programming in Weiss are quite different from
the Finnish course. So there is not very clear correspondence
between those. What follows is just a try...
- For the first examination, Monday 12.3.
- 1.4, 1.5, 1.7, Exercises: 1.13, 1.14
- 2.1-2.4.2, 2.4.4-2.4.6, Exercises: 2.7, 2.10-2.12, perhaps others, too?
- All of chapter 3, Exercises: 3.1-3.10, perhaps others, too?
- 4-4.3, Exercises: 4.1-4.4, 4.9
- One foreign student asked:
"To be brief, I am having trouble with the data structures course
and was wondering if there are any answers available for
the Weiss exercises. I checked the web but there didn't
appear to be any. My problem is not the
programming side but rather the algorithm analysis part. In particular
answers to 2.7 would be the most useful. Another point is that the
questions are not always clear in exercise 3.9 and 3.10 what does it
exactly mean for two lists to be joined by an AND or an OR?"
As far as I know there are no Weiss' solutions in the Net.
About 2.7: You should
be able to estimate the O-classes, but no formal proofs are expected.
And don't panic with the math; we leave it mostly to the course
of Algorithm Analysis. Here it is enough to be able to estimate,
compare and talk of different solutions in the jargon of O-analysis.
About 3.9 and 3.10: These exercises are about implementing sets as
lists, those operations are set intersection and set union.
- For the second examination, Wednesday 11.4.
- 4.3, 4.4, Exercises: 4.9, 4.19, 4.21, 4.25, 4.26
- 5-5.5, Exercises: 5.1, 5.2, 5.8, 5.10
- 6-6.3.3, 6.4.2-6.5, Exercises: 6.2, 6.3, 6.6, 6.12, 6.14
- 7-7.2.1, 7.4(not the analysis), 7.5(not the analysis),
7.6(not the analysis), 7.7(not the analysis 7.7.5 and 7.7.6),
Exercises: 7.1, 7.2, 7.4, 7.11, 7.12, 7.15, 7.19, 7.23, (7.24)
- 9-9.1.1, 9.3-9.3.1, Exercises: 9.5, (9.9)