This class is a first introduction to Computer Science.
Introduction, Boolean algebra (see notes, Wikipedia article on Boolean algebra)
Boolean algebra (ctd.), binary logic and logic gates (see notes)
Flip-flop; number representations (begin, see notes)
Discussion of Exercise Sheet 1, finish discussion of decimal to base-b conversion
Floating point arithmetic (notes, see the floating-point converter for a nice illustration of the bit format; more background can be found in the Wikipedia article on floating point arithmetic and, far more advanced, the paper by Goldberg titled What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic)
Discussion of Exercise Sheet 2, finish discussion of floating point arithmetic (see Python code demonstrating floating point error in derivative computations)
Character strings, ASCII and Unicode encodings (notes, Wikipedia article on Unicode, discussion of C vs. Pascal strings on Stack Overflow); Finite state machines and regular expressions (begin, see notes, slides from Uni Tübingen, Regular expressions and FSMs from Isaac Computer Science; further background reading: Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast)
Discussion of Exercise Sheet 3; finite state machines (continued)
Regular expressions and finite state automata (continued)
Discussion of Exercise Sheet 4; examples for conversion from finite state machines to regular expressions, and vice versa
Beyond regular languages (notes; for background reading, see Chomsky hierarchy, Turing machine and a nice elementary discussion with a bit more details than covered in the book by Forouzan, Chapter 17. Quick overview on computer architectures, for background reading see Moore’s law, (breakdown of) Dennard scaling
No class, please watch the video from the 2017 Turing award lecture and/or read the edited transcript
Discussion of Exercise Sheet 5; instruction set architectures, RISC vs. CISC, introduction to RISC-V (see slides by Martin Berger, University of Sussex, RISC-V online simulator)
Discussion of Exercise Sheet 6; examples for RISC-V assembly
Operating systems (begin): Memory management, process scheduling, concurrency (notes; Forouzan, Chapter 7)
Dining philosophers problem (see Wikipedia; for background reading, see the original Chandy/Misra paper, the Dijkstra/Tannenbaum solution - not covered in class - can be found in more readable pseudocode here)
File systems: mounting, soft links vs. hard links, network file systems (brief mention), RAID (see class notes)
Error detection and correction: Parity, Checksums, Hamming codes (see class notes; also see this online Hamming code calculator; background video on cyclic checksums which explains the concept in more detail than covered in class)
Mock Exam
Computer networks, IP stack
Routing algorithms (see class notes)
Discussion of Mock Exam
Routing algorithms (ctc.); Introduction to relational databases: motivation, relations, tuples, attributes, domains (see, e.g., Lecture 1 from this course)
Relational algebra (basics; see, e.g., Lecture 2 from this course); simple SQL SELECT queries, demonstration using Libreoffice Base