CSCE A201 Midterm Exam Topics

The exam is closed book and closed notes except for one 8.5x11 page of notes in which you can put anything you like.  You will have a variety of questions on the exam.  There will be a small number of short-answer questions.  There will be more questions where you will be asked to write some code, or you will be given some code and asked to produce what the output of the code will be when executed.  The topics that will be covered are listed below:

Everything from Exam #1

• There are no specific questions on the exam #1 material, but you will be expected to know use the concepts for the problems on Exam #2 (e.g., use if-statements, declare variables, loops, etc.)

Methods and Classes

• How to define a method
• Idea of top-down vs. bottom-up design
  • Modular testing
  • Programming with stubs
• Parameter passing
  • Pass by value for primitive data types -- contents of original variable in the caller unchanged
  • Pass by reference for objects -- contents of an object variable in the caller may be changed
• Concept of a class object and creating instances of the object
  • Class member variables
  • Class methods
    • Creating a constructor
    • When a constructor is invoked
  • Public vs. Private, idea of information hiding
  • Writing methods to access member variables (getters/setters/mutators/accessors)
• Static
  • What happens when applied to methods, member variables
  • When is it appropriate to use a static method vs. non-static
    
• Scoping Rules
  • Be prepared to trace through a program with different parameter calls, scoping, and display the output!
• Method overloading

Arrays

• How to define a 1-N dimensional array of some data type
• Accessing, initializing arrays
• Limitations on arrays
  • What if we use = on arrays?
  • What if we use == on arrays?
  • What if we exceed bounds of array?
  • Can we make an array bigger?
• Arrays of Classes
  • How to make an array of a class type
  • Need to create an instance of the object for each array index or you get null
• Array as an object
  • How to pass an array to a method, pass by reference behavior
  • Multidimensional arrays is an array of arrays
  • Array length