On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules – David Parnas A Note On Distributed Computing – Jim Waldo, Geoff Wyant, Ann Wollrath, Sam Kendall The Next 700 Programming Languages – P. J. Landin Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? – John Backus Reflections on Trusting Trust – Ken [...]

Although this article appears to be specific for Computer Science majors, much of it overlaps with software engineering. It outlines some extremely useful and interesting things that all Computer Science/Software Engineering majors should know. The four main questions that this article answers are: What should every student know to get a good job? What should [...]

It’s (almost) time for the Google A.I. Challenge for 2011 already! Check out the official github page for detailed information on the contest, examples, forums, and more. The 2011 Challenge is about ants looking for food on a map and fighting against ants by the opponent. The contest hasn’t started quite yet, but you can [...]

There are a couple of great posts floating around over at the Theoretical Computer Science – Stack Exchange. The trend with these topics is “What should everyone read/watch”. Some of the users have posted some really useful resources and I thought it would be a great idea to aggregate the posts and share them here: [...]

Well it looks like the Google A.I. Challenge is finally complete and the final results are now posted! This post is a follow up to my previous post announcing the contest, Google A.I. Challenge (shwuzzle.com). Normally, the top few spots are dominated by languages such as C/C++, but this year the top spot was written [...]

There are a ton of CS books out there; how do you know which ones to actually sit down and read? The answer could depend on the topic you wish to study and learn more about. I have a fairly large collection of links to well-reviewed Computer Science books that seem to be commonly recommended. [...]

Lately I’ve been exploring the possible career choices of having a graduate level degree (M.Sc. or PH.D) in Computer Science. For me, I’m interested in not only theoretical Computer Science, but also the practical applications of the field. I came across this blog post on scienceblogs.com where three different types of work for Computer Scientists [...]

What is it? Big O Notation describes the limiting behavior of a function when the argument trends toward a certain value. Basically, it helps to describe the complexity and performance of an algorithm. This notation can also help to understand the execution time needed or space required by an algorithm. O(1) This describes an algorithm [...]

For anyone who is interested, the Google AI Challenge is now available at ai-contest.com. I doubt I will do very well at all, but nonetheless they have some really helpful and interesting tutorials on the website. So if nothing else you will have the chance to learn some really interesting things from the contest. The [...]

It can be really tough to tackle challenging programming problems. Many traditional programmers try to start at a really low level abstraction by mistakenly making it harder than it needs to be. I have been in this situation many times. First you should identify what the goal(s) of the actual problem are and try to [...]