Welcome to my First Web Page!

Hello! Since I teach Advanced Placement Computer Science and Calculus at Brea Olinda High School, I'm supposed to know about technology. But the fact is, although I enjoy programming on my TI-83 or in C++ on my iMac, I didn't have the foggiest notion about how to author a Web Page. So here is my first try in facing my fears.

Here is a link to my Electrons applet (if you have problems in one browser, it might still work in another): Electrons applet

At first I will simply use this site to post

• links to good resources for AP CS students
• cool quotes about Computer Science (or otherwise)
• "Benchmarks" Lab Instructions

AP CS Links

AP Computer Science: This is the official site of the College Board where they give great information about the AP CS test.
Skylight Publishing: This is the company that publishes our C++ for You++ textbook--the authors supply some other good resources here.
John Conway's Game of Life (in Java): This is a great implementation in Java of the Game of Life which was one of our labs first semester. As a bonus, the authors provide their complete source code in Java for you to look at--notice how readable Java is if you know C++.

Cool Quotes

I personally start by parsing the statement of the problem (from its original form as a paragraph of English) into nouns and verbs, eliminating redundancies, and creating a mapping between nouns and data structures, and verbs and transformations of data structures.

Paul Fisher

Remember that [program] design is incremental and iterative.

Grady Booch

We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Larry Wall

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

"Benchmarks" Lab Instructions

Run your "Benchmarks" program comparing Sequential vs. Binary Search using vectors of length 5, 10, 25, 50, & 100, recording the average number of comparisons each search algorithm makes over 1500 trials. By hand, make a graph plotting length of vector vs. average number of comparisons for both search functions, and turn that plot in along with your source code.

Special thanks to Steve Callihan, whose book Create Your First Web Page in a Weekend taught me everthing I know so far, and to Leslie Schultz who designed my title banner for me.