Do you need help with your homework, or with understanding the course material in general? If so, you may want to seek the help of our tutors. Help will be available for CS 111, 211, 240, and 313.

Do not be shy about seeking help. If you are having trouble, do NOT put off seeing a tutor until the week just before an exam. The tutors are likely to have a long line of people waiting to see them the week before an exam, but will have much more time to help you at other times.

Different kinds of help will be available at different times of the semester. Direct technical guidance, at machines in the public labs, will be provided ONLY during the first 3 weeks of the semester. After that, it will be assumed that you know how to use the machine. The tutors' focus then will be on helping you learn to think through a problem and plan an algorithm on paper.

• During the first 3 weeks of the semester, there will be tutors and lab assistants holding extended hours in the public labs (I-Bldg. 200 and Science Bldg. A-135. Their goal will be to help you apply for and access your forbin account, and then to help you learn how to use basic Unix commands, the vi editor, the gcc compiler, and basic C++ syntax and I/O. Click here for a schedule of when there will be tutors and lab assistants available to help you during the first three weeks.

• After the first three weeks, the tutors will help you using pen, paper, and printouts only, no machines. Click here for the regular tutoring schedule. The room number will be anounced here later. Below are some guidelines on what you should do before seeking a tutor's help, after the first three weeks.

How to help us help you

When seeking either an instructor's or a tutor's help AFTER the first three weeks of the semester, please be nice and observe the following courtesies, which will make it much easier for us to help you efficiently, and which also have a high chance of helping you discover errors yourself before you see the tutor.

• If you are at a total loss as to how to even begin to write an assigned program, try at least to write, using pen and paper, an informal draft of a possible algorithm. Bring this draft with you when you see the tutor.

• If you want advice on debugging a program, please bring a printout of your program, and please also bring either a printout of the output or a hand copy of the output -- or the syntax error message, if your program didn't compile. But BEFORE you make a printout, please make sure your program is readable, with proper indentation, etc. Please do not make the tutor spend extra effort on reading a hard-to-read program. Furthermore, correcting the indentation of your program may, in itself, help you find errors. Then, generate a printout with line numbers. (You will be shown how to do this in one of the examples accompanying Assignment 3.)

  If you do not yet know how to indent a program properly, go to a tutor to ask about indentation. But do not ask for or expect any OTHER kind of help with debugging a program until you know how to indent properly. Do not ask the tutor to try to read a hard-to-read program.

  If you need advice on debugging syntax errors, please also mark, on your printout, the lines of your program on which your errors were detected, according to the compiler error messages.

  If you need advice on debugging runtime errors, please do both an algorithm walk-through and a line-by-line code trace first, using pen and paper, before you see the tutor. (See Dale, Chapter 5, pp. 249 to 259. For an example of a code trace involving nested loops, see Chapter 6, p. 299.) If, by so doing, you don't succeed in discovering the problem yourself, see the tutor, bringing your algorithm walk-through, your code trace, and a numbered printout of your program.

• Do not ask for help with programming problems via E-mail, except by special permission. Seek tutoring help in person only.

If you aren't seeking help with a programming problem, but just have some general questions, no special preparation is necessaray. Just go see the tutor. However, if you want help in understanding what's wrong with a program, you MUST make the above preparations, for both your own and the tutors' sake, and also for the sake of other students who may be waiting in line to see the tutor after you.

Here are guidelines which the tutors themselves are to follow when helping students.

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