Getting Started With Programming

Notes for the required material 

• These notes can be purchased in the Student Union Copy Center at cost
• Starting Pascal Programming: Basic program structure, variables, documentation, input and output in Pascal (Leestma & Nyhoff Chapter 3): [PowerPoint] [Acrobat]

Optional teaching material

• None

Background / Sources of additional information

• Pascal Programming and Problem Solving by Leestma S. and Nyhoff L. 4th Edition (Macmillan Publishing Company).
• Pascal an Introduction to the Art and Science of Programming by Savitch W.J. (The Benjamin / Cummings Publishing Co., Inc.). 
• The link to the online documentation for the GNU Pascal compiler (since you will be using the GNU Pascal compiler 'gpc').  You may also be interested in browsing the rest of the site as well.

Teaching Tips

The main point of this section is to introduce the basic parts of a computer program and how commonly used operations are implemented in the language.  Because the basics are generally the same regardless of the programming language taught in this course (e.g., Pascal, C, C++, Java etc.) this section should include the fundamental concepts such as: the basic structure of a program written in the language (e.g., header, some sort of starting point for execution such as a 'main' c-), how basic input and output is implemented by the programming language, what are the common mathematical operators in the language.