Review Questions and Exercises

Each chapter contains a set of roughly 30 review questions and 20 exercises. The review questions are relatively straightforward; their answers can all be found directly in the text. The exercises are intended to be more thought-provoking. They range in difficulty from puzzles requiring a few seconds of reflection to projects worthy of weeks or months of research.

Using chapter 8 as an example, exercises might ask the student to

solve some simple computation or puzzle (8.3)
investigate the behavior of some language or compiler (8.2)
build a program to perform some interesting task (8.21)
research a topic in the library or on-line (8.16)
explore or evaluate an idea not covered in the text (8.17)
state and defend an opinion on some subjective issue (8.12)

As in the body of the text itself, there is a heavy emphasis on identifying tradeoffs and understanding why things were designed the way they were, or work the way they do.

For the less open-ended exercises, there is a growing body of suggested solutions available on-line. These are password protected, for the benefit of instructors only. Please contact your Morgan Kaufmann sales representative for access.

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Last Change: 30 October 2005 / Michael Scott's email address