Practicum in Software Construction - Midterm Study Guide

Midterm Format

The midterm will be administered through Canvas on Wednesday March 3rd. It will be available all day but you will have 2.5 hours to complete the exam once you start. It is open book and open computer but all work must be completed independently. It will contain a mix of freeform concept questions, "find the bug" type problems, and a couple short coding exercises.

What is not on the test?

  • The libraries and tools I bring up in the first 5 minutes of class. Those are just for fun. That includes Lombok, Spring-Data
  • Maven libraries as a general concept are fair game but I would not expect you to study any of the specific libraries we've used so far other than Spring and JUnit
  • We only brushed over Cucumber so I won't ask you to write Cucumber tests. The concept of Behavior Driven Development is fair game though
  • I'm not expecting you to know any specific open source licenses.
  • Art History will not be on the Midterm

Topics

This may not be a 100% complete list of topics but it should get you most of the way to what you need. The slides are your friends and some of the interactive slides / code examples might be really helpful.

  • Git topics
    • What is a commit?
    • How do you make a commit?
    • What are branches?
    • What does checking out a branch or a commit do?
    • What is a merge? What is a merge conflict?
    • Remote commands like clone, pull, push
    • Relationship between Git and GitHub
  • Licenses
    • What is open source code? What are the boundaries on how you can restrict use?
    • What is a copyleft license?
  • Package Managers
    • What is a package manager? Why do we use them?
    • How does Maven help keep your Java project organized?
    • What is a JAR file?
    • Semantic Versioning
  • Http
    • Parts of an HTTP Request and Response
    • General networking concepts (IP addresses, public / private / local IP)
    • General info in a URL
    • The general idea of what REST is all about
  • Spring
    • What is Dependency Injection? Why is it helpful?
    • HTTP annotations for making a Spring server
      • @RestController
      • @GetMapping / @PostMapping / etc
      • @PathVariable / @RequestBody / @RequestParam
    • How to do dependency Injection
  • Automated Testing
    • How to write JUnit Tests?
    • What is the structure of a test?
    • Purpose of Test Driven Development
    • Purpose of Behavior Driven Development
  • State Management & Functional Programming
    • What is a pure function?
    • The state management errors we talked about in class
  • APIs
    • What is an API?
    • What are some of the things to think about when making an API?

Tips

  • Get good at setting up a setting up a basic Spring project in your IDE. Maybe set up one ahead of time. Don't waste time futzing with IDE settings.
  • Make sure you know how to start a Spring server how to test your @GetMapping / @PostMapping / etc methods. If you haven't figured out Postman yet, now is the time.
  • Make sure you know how to include a new library in your project from Maven