UCR CS Technical Seminar Series

Presented by ACM

Technical Seminars are brief (1 to 2 hour) talks about some hands-on aspect of Computer Science. They are intended to be an informal talk, and are open to anyone that is interested. Seminars are usually held in the late afternoon/early evening, but it is generally up to the speaker. For any presentation that has accompanying slides, links to the presentation slides will generally be linked to on this page.

These are intended to be interactive sessions. To encourage interactivity (and attendance), candy is provided for those brave enough to ask questions or comment on the material.

All talks are held in Surge 284 unless otherwise noted.

Please note: If you are interested in presenting or have an idea for a topic that you'd like to see someone else cover, please email Titus.

Previous Years

2003-2004

Spring 2006 Seminar

Thursday April 6 - Python
Titus Winters
A 90 minute introduction to the Python programming language. Topics include basic control flow and data structures, operating system support, networking, and more.
Lecture code available here.

Fall 2004 Seminars

Wednesday Sep 29, 6:30-~8pm - C++
Titus Winters
A 1.5 or 2 hour summary of syntax and language features for C++. Topics will include compilation with g++, strings, streams, vectors, memory allocation / cleanup, objects, inheritance, operator overloading, templates, and more.
Tuesday Oct 5, 6:30-8pm - Python
Titus Winters
Python is an interpreted, interactive, "object-oriented" programming language. It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme, or Java.

Python combines remarkable power with very clear syntax. It has modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing. There are interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as various windowing systems for building GUIs (wxWidgets, X11, Motif, Tk, Mac, MFC). New modules are easily written in C or C++.

This talk is recommend by Peter for his CS100, CS152, and CS180 courses.

The two best resources for learning Python are The Official Python Tutorial (for the novice programmer) and Dive Into Python (for programmers fluent in other languages).

How to multiply two python "matrices" in ~1 line of code
Oct 15, 3-4pm - Unix Survival Skills
Jacob Lewallen
Linux/Unix mysteries solved here! Come find out how to print, view your favorite file types, find help, and more.
Oct 18-22 - GDB
Cancelled due to Murphy's Law

Nov 3rd, 6:30-7:30pm - LaTeX
Peter Fröhlich
LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system, with features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

If you find yourself trying to write up equations in MS Formula Editor, make life easy on yourself and come to this seminar.

LaTeX is not like any other document generation software, having more in common with a programming language than with MS Word. LaTeX takes a little getting used to (like realizing that LaTeX knows more about typesetting than you do, and thus it is probably right about where to put things.) Come to this seminar for a gentle introduction and sales pitch.

Peter's LaTeX example.

Nov 8, 7-8pm - Bash Script
Jason Lee
Did you know that the Linux command line that you work with is actually a Turing-complete programming language? Jason will cover a range of topics including special variables, functions, control flow, program flow, and the things that are most difficult about Bash for C/C++ programmers.

Unscheduled Topics

Reminder: If you are interested in presenting or have an idea for a topic that you'd like to see someone else cover, please email Titus.

Eclipse - The cross-platform heir-apparent to the IDE throne - ???
SQL - The lingua franca of the database world - ???
emacs - The world's only thermonuclear text editor - ???
vi - Yin to Emacs' Yang. Highly featured, fast, console based editor - ???
ML - A provably type-safe, mostly functional, polymorphic programming experience
GDB - Learn to use the debugger
Java - The buzzword programming language of the late 90s - ???
PHP - A common scripting language for web development - ???
Ruby - Python's comrade-in-arms in the fight against Perl. The ease of Python with the pure OO of Java. - Jacob?
GDB - Using the debugger - ???
C++ STL - The C++ Standard Template Library: The only reason C++ is usable at all - Titus?