Calvin's Computer Science Page

This page is dedicated to the computer science students at Penn State Harrisburg. I have spent a lot of time finding ways to avoid the computer labs. Below you will find information about general software and software specific to classes. If you find other software that you think others would be interested in please email me at ced118@psu.edu. I will check it out and add it to the appropriate area. Remember, any information you supply will help your fellow students, so be generous.

My first suggestion is to install Linux on your home computer. This is by far the least expensive method to acquire about 90% of the software that you will ever need. With a Linux distribution, which costs under $70.00, you get C, C++, PASCAL, FORTRAN, etc. The hard part of this is installing it on your home computer, it takes time and it is not for the weak-of-heart. There are three main releases out there and all can be ordered from Walnut Creek CDROM or you can download them from the software archives at Walnut Creek CDROM. Unless you have access to a T1 line I'd suggest purchasing the CDROM's. The following is a list of Linux Web Sites along with other related sites that are dedicated to Linux.

FreeBSD	www.freebsd.org
RedHat	www.RedHat.com
Slackware	www.slackware.com
Mandrake	www.linux-mandrake.com
Related Linux Software	Free Software Foundation
Linux Information	Linux Org.
LinuxWorld	Linux World

If you would like to email me with information about your experiences(pro or con) with any release of Linux, please include the release name and version. If I get enough information I will add a page of Linux information.

With that out of the way, lets look at general software that is handy in many classes. There are three that I use regularly.

Program File Editor(PFE). It is a very good text editor for programming and it is free.

EditPlus is an excellent editor with syntax highlighting, auto completion, etc for a bunch of languages. You can also create your own syntax and auto complete files. Cost $30.00.

Smartdraw. It is a good program for doing linked lists, trees, ER diagrams and other types of flow diagrams.

Ghostscript, Ghostview and GSview This a a postscript system that allows you to view and print postscript files.

C, C++ & Pascal Compilers You can download free C, C++ and Pascal compilers. I have used the C/C++ compiler and it works fine.

Now lets look at software specific to classes. Most of the software mentioned below is free and will run under DOS, Windows or Linux so you have to check out the appropriate web site for what works with what. If multiple programs are listed for the same language, the ones marked with * are the ones I recommend.

	COMP402 Computer Organization and Assembly Language	Diglog - Electronic Circuit Simulator Minim - Boolean Expression Minimization Tool
	Basic logic design and architecture of computers. Coding, number representations, arithmetic, logical operations, machine-level functions and assembly language programming. Prerequisite: Pascal, Ada, C, or FORTRAN.

	COMP403 Advanced Assembly Language Programming	MASM - Microsoft Assembler TASM - Inspire(Borland) Assembler Assemblers for PC's
	Binary arithmetic, table handling, editing, bit manipulation and translation, subroutines, Macro writing tape, direct-access programming. QSAM, ISAM, VSAM, JCL.

	COMP 408 Introductory ADA and Program Design	ADA Compilers
	Structured program design using Ada; strong typing, data abstraction, packages, subprograms, separate compilation, visibility, exceptions, generic units.

	COMP409 Advanced ADA Programming Language	ADA Compilers
	Advanced types, exceptions, generic units and tasking, and their use in software systems.

	COMP412 System Programming	BACI - Ben-Ari Concurrent Interpreter
	Design and implementation of systems software.

	COMP416 Topics in Programming Languages	MIT Scheme DrScheme * Java Anzi Prolog * BinProlog
	Specification, analysis, and run-time behavior of higher level (problem-solving) computer languages.

	COMP418 Compiler Construction	FLEX - Fast Lexical Analyzer Generator YACC - Yet Another Compiler-Compiler
	Programming language structure, basic automata theory, design of a compiler, scanning and parsing, semantic processing, code generation, and error detecting. (Thanks Julie)

	COMP519 Advanced Topics in Database Management Systems	ObjectStore - Object Database JDK - Java Developement Kit Forte - Java IDE Installing JDK & ObjectStore
	Concurrency control, crash recovery, query processing, semantic data models, advanced file access, distributed database systems, performance, case studies, advanced applications

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