CS101 Midterm Exam #2 Topics

The midterm exam is closed book and closed notes.

There will be a number of problems to work through (no multiple choice) that are similar to the homework. Consequently, the best way to study for the test is to understand your homework questions and be able to answer the questions at the end of the chapters in the book.

Networking

Construction of a LAN using hubs, switches, bridges
Network configurations: star, bus, tree, ring
Scope of networks: LAN to MAN to WAN

Routers to connect networks together

Basic concepts behind Ethernet (CSMA/CD) and Wireless (CSMA/CA)

How CSMA/CA gets around the hidden terminal problem

Purpose of an IP address

IP v4 - problem running out of addresss; how this is solved with IP v6

Purpose of ICANN
How DNS is used to resolve a hostname (map hostname to IP address)

Hierarchy of DNS host servers

Concept of the layered network model and what happens at each layer

Application layer
Transport layer
Network layer
Link layer

How a message is split into packets, packets transmitted independently, routed across the network, then reassembled by the receiver

Algorithms

Know what an algorithm is
Pseudocode primitives: assignment, if statement, while loop, procedure
Given an algorithm in pseudocode be able to describe what it does
Given a problem, design an algorithm in pseudocode to solve it
Understand how binary search and sequential search algorithms work

Concept of recursion

Efficiency of algorithms - how many steps an algorithm requires to run, e.g. Theta notation

Given an algorithm describe its efficiency in terms of the size of the input problem

Database Systems

Know what a DBMS is and advantages over using a flat file system
Relational database model and organization of data into tables with records (rows) and attributes (columns)
Concept of linking tables together with common fields to relate one to the other
Be able to design a set of database tables for some problem
Normalization process of splitting data into separate tables instead of one giant table

Advantage of normalization

Be able to write a SQL SELECT statement to execute some query to retrieve data with a WHERE clause from one or more tables
Be able to give the results of a SQL SELECT statement given some tables and data in the tables