This is the official site of course Ceng 111. Ceng 111 is an introductory course to Computer Engineering and Science concepts exclusive to the undergraduates of the Department of Computer Engineering, METU.

This site is one of the means of communication between the instructors and students. The others are lectures and through the course under odtuclass.metu.edu.tr. The news forum on ODTUClass should be checked on a daily basis for the announcements.

This site also contains various Python resources as it is used as a tool to introduce fundamental computer science concepts.

Grades are announced through ODTUClass system.

Table of Contents

• Course Info
  • Lecture Hours
  • Textbook & References
  • Course Weekly Coverage
  • Course Grading
  • METU Code of Ethics and Core Values
• Take Home Exam
• Lab
  • Laboratory Content and Schedule
  • Laboratory Section Hours
  • Laboratory Section Arrangement
• Library

Course Info

Catalog Description

Introduction to the fundamentals of computer systems, including computer organization, operating systems, language processors and user interfaces. Introduction to algorithms and programming. Reasoning informally about the correctness and efficiency of programs. A functional programming language will be used for practical work. Credits: 3+2

Objective

To provide a basic understanding of fundamental concepts in computer science and engineering. To improve the skills to work with abstract notions for solving computational problems. Teaching a particular programming language is not a primary objective; the language will serve as a medium for experimentation.

Prerequisites

None

Lecture Hours

• Section 1: Tuesday 11:40 - 13:30 (BMB-1) + Wednesday 15:40 - 16:30 (BMB-1) - Sinan Kalkan
• Section 2: Tuesday 09:40 - 11:30 (BMB-1) + Thursday 10:40 - 11:30 (BMB-1) - Göktürk Üçoluk

You are free to attend any section. All sections will exactly receive the same lecturing and treatment. Attendance is usually not recorded. Though, we reserve the right to perform an attendance check at any time.

Lecturers

- Sinan Kalkan, A209, skalkan[at]ceng.metu.edu.tr

- Göktürk Üçoluk, A408, ucoluk[at]ceng.metu.edu.tr

Teaching Assistants

- Selay Tekgül, A402, selay[at]ceng.metu.edu.tr

- Merve Asiler, B207, asiler[at]ceng.metu.edu.tr

- Orhun Buğra Baran, A409, bugra[at]ceng.metu.edu.tr

- Mustafa Yavuz Kara, A409, myk[at]ceng.metu.edu.tr

- Atakan Garipler, B202, garipler[at]ceng.metu.edu.tr

- Saim Sünel, A410, saimsunel[at]ceng.metu.edu.tr 

Textbook & References

• Introduction to Computer Hardware and Systems: Lecture Notes, by G. Üçoluk and S. Kalkan, 2024. (Available in ODTUClass course page.)
• Introduction to Programming Concepts with Case Studies in Python, by G. Üçoluk and S. Kalkan, 2012. Webpage -Springer's page (This book is downloadable for the students of the course due to METU's purchased site license. See Librarylink of the course home page.)

• Invitation to Computer Science, by G. Schneider and J. Gersting, West.

Course Conduct

Dear students,

Ceng 111 is an introductory course for Computer Science concepts.

Practically the course constitutes of two parts:

• A first part in which an overview of the current hardware (the Van Neuman Architecture) and its functionality is given. Following this, how basic data types are stored and handled is explained.
• A second part where basic algorithmic and computational concepts are introduced following a functional paradigm. The Python language is used as the workbench.

The course conduct has a four legged support.

1. Lectures
2. Text book(s)
3. Labs
4. Take Home Exams

The followings are to be mentioned:

• The lectures are not a voicing of the text material. They will cover aspect which are not covered in the course books or will put an emphesis on some of the aspects.
• In the first part of the lecture the student is expected to gain a broad coverage of the introduced subjects mainly by him/herself. Internet search engines, encyclopedias are excellent sources for such broad-but-shallow information. As a part of the university education strategy students are expected to learn how to acquire and obtain knowledge directly by her/himself. Therefore if you are a student of the course, do trace the terminalogy which is unfamiliar to you. Make notes of it, and later during your selfstudy time eagerly consult the internet to get a grasp of the unfamiliar items.
• The Laboratory study serves two purposes:
  1. To practical subjects which is not covered in the lectures (like Linux set up, primary UNIX usage, the vi editor, conducting intelligent searches on the internet, etc.)
  2. To experiment with Python and perform some small algorithmic applications in a closed-lab environment.
• For each lab session, you will have an examination from which you will gain an important fraction of the course grade.
• Take-Home Exams have a contribution to your overall grade the same as the midterm examination does. We strongly advise that you take the exams seriously. There are 4 Take-Home Exams. The last three Take-Home Exams are Python programming tasks and will be graded automatically (by means of a testing program). Though the input/output testing of a Take-Home Exams is a “blackbox test”, your source code will be investigated for neatness and plagiarism. 

This work is considered as EXAMINATION. Any plagiarism will be considered as CHEATING IN EXAMINATION.

• Usually you will have a 2-3 weeks of time to turn your take-home exams in. This time shall be used properly. The level of the take-home exams are so that a “hard work on the last 2-3 days” will not suffice. You are strongly advised to start concentrating on it right after you received it.
• The forums in the ODTUClass system is devoted to the announcements and discussion of course-related matters.

You SHOULD check the news forum on ODTUClass every day.

Course Weekly Coverage

• Introduction [0.5 Week]
  1. Course content, objectives, outline
  2. Homeworks, the labs, the exams
  3. Newsgroup, Website
• Computing and Computation [2 weeks]
  1. What is computing/computation?
  2. Digital computation, analog computation and nature's computation: Pros and Cons
  3. Digital computation
     1. Basic digital computational elements: Switches, transistors, vacuum tubes, water stream taps
     2. How to make basic gates
     3. Boolean Logic – Digital Circuit connection
     4. Truth table
     5. 1-bit addition, N-bit addition
     6. Memory: Using capacitance
     7. 1-bit addition, N-bit addition
  4. Von Neumann architecture
     1. The separation abstraction of Memory, CPU.
     2. Pros and cons
     3. Conceptional separation of data & algorithm
     4. Limits of the register size and the processer design on the types of the primitive data
     5. Overcoming these limits
• Binary Representation of: [0.5 Week]
  1. Integers: 2s and 1s complement
  2. Floating points (IEEE 754 standard)
  3. Characters (ASCII Table)
  4. Strings
• Von Neumann Architecture: Revisited [0.5 Week]
  1. Machine-level instructions
  2. Fetch-Decode-Execute cycle and how it works
  3. Different registers: MAR, MDR, IR, PC
  4. The need for higher-level languages: assemblers and more
• Other components of a computer [0.5 week]
  1. BIOS, Boot device, MBR, OS
  2. Booting up a computer
  3. Interrupts: service interrupts and time interrupts. Their importance and usage.
  4. Virtual memory. Physical and logical addresses. Paging. DMA.
  5. Rotational Storage Devices
• The world of programming and the zoo of programming languages: [0.5 week]
  1. Compiled vs. interpreted languages
  2. Programming paradigms:
     1. Imperative, Functional, Object-oriented, Declarative-Logical, Parallel-Concurrent
  3. How do we choose among the paradigms and the available languages?
  4. Current trend
• 'Simple' data types [0.5 week]
  1. number: float, int
  2. string: str
  3. list: lists of numbers, strings and nested lists
  4. variables and naming conventions
  5. type function
• Introduction to operators [1 week]
  1. Operators on numbers: Addition, multiplication, division (integer and float)
  2. Operators on strings: Concatenation, repetition
  3. Operators on lists: Length, access and membership operators, addition, deletion
  4. BNF notation
  5. Precedence & Associativity
  6. Explicit, implicit casting; type conversion
  7. Assignment; l-type, r-type expressions
  8. Expression evaluation
• Conditionals and loops [1 week]
  1. Boolean values
  2. Turing machine; determinism, discreteness and conditionals
  3. if statements
  4. while, for statements
• Functions [2 weeks]
  1. System defined: type, length, print
     1. Using “import”
     2. Simple math functions
  2. User defined
     1. Defining a function
     2. Value of functions
     3. Call by value, reference and sharing
  3. Recursion
• Abstract Data Types [3 week]
  1. Stack
  2. Queue, priority queue
  3. Tree
  4. and others
• Object-oriented programming [1 weeks]

  1. Why need objects?
  2. Member variables and methods; private vs. public members
  3. Encapsulation, inheritance, polymorhpism

Course Grading

METU Code of Ethics and Core Values

“The members of the METU community are reliable, responsible and honourable people who embrace only the success and recognition they deserve, and act with integrity in their use, evaluation and presentation of facts, data and documents.”

All students are expected to honour this code and the core values outlined at: https://www.metu.edu.tr/code-ethics-core-values

Notes about the Conduct of the Course under Pandemic

1. The course will be conducted with face-to-face, conforming to the health and safety regulations outlined by the Ministry of Health, the Council of Higher Education, the University and the Department.
2. This “face-to-face” conduct means that all lectures, the laboratory sessions, and midterm & final exams will take place in classrooms or laboratories, physically.
3. In the event that department-wide, university-wide, city-wide or nation-wide closures are introduced, the course conduct will continue remotely and the details of the conduct will be determined by the specifications of the closures. Such an online conduct of the course will assume that the students have access to a personal computer, a camera (or a mobile phone with a camera) and the Internet for online participation in lectures, labs and exams.
4. In the event of a violation of METU Code of Ethics, the affected activities, questions or tasks may be canceled, re-organized or their contribution to the overall grading may be changed; additional forms of performance validation (verbally or in written form) may be required.

Take Home Exam

Take Home Exam Regulations

Late Submission

For ALL Take Home Exam submissions, late submission is NOT allowed. The deadline is the last second where the day of submission changes to the day after.
This grading policy is strict!

Plagiarism

All academic work, written or otherwise, submitted by students to their instructors or other academic supervisors, is expected to be the result of their own thought, research, or self-expression.
In cases where students feel unsure about a question of plagiarism involving their work, they are obliged to consult their instructors on the matter before submission.

When students submit work purporting to be their own, but which in any way borrows ideas, organization, wording or anything else from another source without appropriate acknowledgment of the fact, the students are guilty of plagiarism.

Plagiarism includes reproducing someone else's work, whether it be a published article, chapter of a book, a paper from a friend or some file, or whatever. Plagiarism also includes the practice of employing or allowing another person to alter or revise the work which a student submits as his/her own, whoever that other person may be.
Students may discuss assignments among themselves or with an instructor or tutor, but when the actual work is done, it must be done by the student, and the student alone.

When a student's assignment involves research in outside sources or information, the student must carefully acknowledge exactly what, where and how he/she has employed them.
If the words of someone else are used, the student must put quotation marks around the passage in question and add an appropriate indication of its origin. Making simple changes while leaving the organization, content and phraseology intact is plagiaristic. However, nothing in these Rules shall apply to those ideas which are so generally and freely circulated as to be a part of the public domain.

Cheating

Cheating is defined by its general usage. It includes, but is not limited to, the wrongfully giving, taking, or presenting any information or material by a student with the intent of aiding himself/herself or another on any academic work which is considered in any way in the determination of the final grade.

Lab

Laboratory Manual and Linux Cheat-Sheet

- Lab Manual Download

- Linux Cheat-Sheet Download

Linux Exercise

Linux Exercise Questions (Online Version)

The linux exercise questions are very similar to your first lab quiz in format.