Goals of the Course

• Understand the tools of the trade:
  • Data Structures that allow certain operations on the data to be done efficiently.

  • Algorithms that perform operations and maintain the data structure.

• Gain experience in using library packages
  • the buy-versus-build decision

• Understand performance:
  • Big O: mathematical shorthand for rate of growth.

  • How to analyze a problem, design a solution, and estimate the performance.

  • How to analyze an existing design or program, spot the performance problems, and fix them.

• Gain experience in other programming paradigms:
  • Lisp: a notation, as well as a language
  • Patterns or Rewrite Rules
  • MapReduce, Hadoop and parallel data-intensive programming