Asides

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Slides

Lecture notes and asides use the Wrap presentation system, so use PageUp/Down or arrow keys to navigate

PDF versions of asides are not provided; let me know if the lecture PDFs are not up to date

To make your own PDFs of asides or lectures, use Chrome, press Alt+p to make all the slides visible, then print, choosing the Save-to-PDF option

What are asides?

Asides are slides which cover small topics, where there isn't time to deal with them in lectures, or where self-study is better

Some of them are essential to the unit, others represent general background knowledge that all computer scientists should have

There will be links to them from lectures and coursework assignments

They are a bit like web tutorials, so why can't you learn everything from the web?

Web tutorials

We all like to use tutorials on the Web:

• learning to cook something from a YouTube video
• learning to program from codeacademy
• using Google to check out a language feature or programming trick

Web tutorials are often called HowTos

Quality

One problem with HowTos on the Web is quality:

• the design of the programs can be terrible
• the style of the programming can be terrible
• the information can be obsolete or just wrong

On the whole, it is reasonably easy to learn to spot these problems and work around them

Why?

But the biggest problem with HowTos is that they almost never tell you Why

As a result, you gain a very shallow understanding of things

You solve a problem using a HowTo, then you come across a similar problem, but you still can't do it yourself, because you learned little or nothing

Explaining Why

Lectures, coursework assignments, and these asides, are designed to answer "why" questions, and give you an opportunity to ask lecturers and lab helpers "why" questions

They give you the context to understand, and the ability to solve new problems on your own