In the slides and videos section below, I will post slides and pre-recorded discussion section videos before 6PM on the day before the live discussion section. In a discussion section video, I will primarily present information regrading up-coming programming assignments. I will also post live discussion section videos there.

Each live discussion section is conducted by a TA. Below is a list showing which TA is responsible for which discussion section:

  • Fri 10:00am - 10:50am on Zoom (Zoom meeting ID given in Lecture 0) - Ben Yan
  • Fri 12:00pm - 12:50pm on Zoom (Zoom meeting ID given in Lecture 0) - Zhuojin Li
During a live discussion section, the TA will answer questions about the pre-recorded video and answer your questions about programming assignments. If you have a particular topic that you would like the TA to discuss in class (including stuff like something covered in lectures that you would like the TA to explain further), you should send e-mail to the TA before 6PM on Thursday. The TA will try his/her best to cover such requests.

Please note that programming assignments are due on Fridays. Since you are expected to have finished the an assignment before its due date, on the due date of a programming assignment, the TA will be introducint the next programming assignment and that takes priority over the current assignment. If there is time left, the TA can discuss the current assignment.

To download all the PDF files below in one command (so you can study for exams), do the following inside a terminal in Ubuntu 16.04:

    wget -r -l 1 --user=USERID --password=PASSWORD http://merlot.usc.edu/cs402-s21/discussions.html
where USERID and PASSWORD are the user ID and password used to access protected content from our class web site. But please note that the lecture slides can change at any time without notice. Therefore, it's a good idea to re-run the above command often to synchroniza your copy with the server!

The discussion section videos are there to help you with programming assignments. Therefore, it's advisable that you watch the discussion section videos first before you start writing a lot of code! Even though the date of a discussion section may be in the future, if a video is available early, it's useful to check it out as early as possible! This can save you from having to rewrite a lot of code.

It's possible that you may get confused when you watch a discussion section video because you are not familiar enough with the spec and what you are supposed to do. But that's okay! It's important that you have seen the material so that when you are going in the wrong direction, you may be able to stop and review the material again before proceeding. As I have mentioned many times, if you are confused about anything, don't hesitate to ask me! I'm here to help and I cannot help you if you don't ask questions!

(Please note that access to discussion slides and videos are restricted.)

The following are tentative discussion section slides (in PDF format) for this semester. Please note that the source code below is for the purpose of discussions and may not be identical to the code in your assignments. It would be a really bad idea (because you can lose a lot of points) to replace the code in your assignments with the code here!