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Week 1 - Up and Running

Discussion Agenda​

  1. Welcome!
  2. Introductions
  3. Schedule & Content Overview
  4. Discussion of async content for the week

Reading & Async Content​

This week is all about hand-on self-learning. Choose a language to learn and dive in. The Practice section below provides some exercises you should be able to do in the language you choose.

But first, let's briefly talk about choosing a language.

Choosing a Language​

Source: https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages

GeeksForGeeks lists Javascript, Python, Java, TypeScript, C/C++, C#, PHP, Kotlin, Swift, and Go as the top 10 languages to learn in 2023. Google something along the lines of "best programming languages to learn" and you'll find countless similar lists. They all vary a little, but there are 5 our so that are on almost every list.

Our top 3 choices are:

Other worthwhile choices are:

Some more less common or special-purpose options are: Ruby, PHP, Perl, Bash / Shell Scripting, Julia, R

Practice​

1. Roman Numerals​

Write a program that takes a Roman numeral string as input and returns the integer value as output. Consider some of the following test cases:

  • Common cases - I, III, V, X, XX, XXI, etc.
  • The subtractive case - IV, IX
  • Subtraction after addition - XXIV, XXXIX
  • Invalid cases - IIIV, VX, IIIII, etc.
  • Invalid characters - FOO or 123

2. Factorial​

Given a number, N, calculate the factorial of N. The factorial of 0 is 1, the factorial of 1 is 1, for all other positive N the factorial is N times factorial(N-1) number.

  • How big of an N can your code handle before it fails?
  • How long does it take to run?
  • When it does fail, why?

The intent of these questions is to get you exploring the limitations and boundaries of a given language. Some languages may have issues with this problem, others may not.

(optional) Extra Challenge​

Understanding Dictionary Attacks. Given representative user/password file containing a list of users and their hashed passwords, determine the passwords. You can download the file passwd.txt file here. Try using one of the word lists available here to build your dictionary.

Problem set hints

  1. Click to reveal me
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