A collaborative effort on writing a good disposition for the algorithms and data structures exam topics.
The course syllabus is quite big and the topics covered can be hard to understand. The document seeks to present these in a concise manner that is easily understandable, thereby ensuring everyone stands a good chance of preparing a good performance during the actual examination.
There are several ways for you to help out with this project. After you have been granted permission to alter the code on the repository you can do one of two things to contribute to the project; read the sections of the document through as they are added and use the issue-tracker on GitHub to report inconsistencies or requests for improvement, additions, etc. Or, you can start writing what you think should go into the document for the good of others.
- Write the repository owner and ask to be added as a contributor on the project
- Get a cloned copy of the repository
- Copy/paste one of the authors and replace it with your own information.
- Start writing and commit your contributions, or use the issue-tracker to help.
As this document is specifically meant as a reference tool for the oral exam, we would like anything that gets added or revised to be very short, concise and to-the-point. Keep everything you write relevant to the subject in question and do not write exhaustively long paragraphs that doesn't help the student during the preparation time or under the exam itself.
We have adopted a structure that we believe helps the student refresh the topic quickly and that ensures no time is spent on time-consuming look-ups in the book, but rather gives a precise description of what should be talked about during the topic discussion, what assignments are relevant for the assignment talk, and possible extra questions.
Each chapter corresponds to an examination topic, and the first page clearly states the topic, keywords for the topic in question, and what assignments that are relevant to this topic. Besides these short informational points, the remainder of the first page gives a short description of the topic to be discussed, which serves as a quick reminder to the student. Subsequent pages within a chapter (or exam topic) are carefully thought out subtopics that should be covered during the examination. These sections should include a helping hand such that if the student gets stuck or has trouble remembering, the document will help the student get back up (ie. step-by-step proofs).
The appendix gives the most important definitions and summaries relevant for most, if not all, of the topics.
The document is initially written in English for purposes of redistributing later for the next students on this course, and others like it. If you want, you are free to translate the document, but consult the repository owner before doing so, as we would like to keep the repository structure in good shape, and so this would have to be discussed before committing those sorts of changes.