I have been teaching a variety of subjects at several schools since 1985. I have a Ph.D in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. I worked at Lucent Technologies for about 16 years. I have been making my living programming computers since 1977. You can call me whatever you want. Kent, Dr. Archie, Professor, etc are all fine.
Please interrupt with questions at any time. I would rather answer questions in the context they come up rather than later when we have forgotten what we were talking about. I make very few assumptions about what you know. It is easy for me to forget that there was a time when I didn't know these things. If I use terms or expressions you don't know, ask me. I don't expect you to know them unless I told you about them.
Feel free to suggest other topics that you would like to see cover. I'll at least explain what they are about and if there is time and they fit in, we'll cover them. Also tell me if you want me to present the material in a particular way. I tend to learn best be looking at examples. So I tend to teach by example. But maybe it works better for you if I gave the specific syntax rules for things. I can do that, I just need to know you want to do that.
Tell me about things you want changed now rather than in the class evaluation at the end. I read and adjust my teaching based on them, but it won't help you.
The goal of teaching is for information that I have to end up in your head. Anything you think will help that is something you should tell me. I don't take this stuff personally, and besides, I have an extremely poor memory for names.
It is important to understand that you can't fake competence in the software engineering world. I have written well received book reports in high school without reading the book. You can't talk the computer into doing what you want, you have to know how to do it. The school preoccupation with plagiarism is based partly on this. You have to practice what you are learning and you have to do it yourself. You can't learn piano by watching your sister play. And if you get her to do your practicing, you will be in trouble at the recital.
In the academic world, ideas are more important than money. The worst thing you can do is to steal someone's ideas. So, plagiarism is the worst crime. But, really, it's the practice thing that makes it bad for you to copy others work. You might get a better grade here, but when you are trying to do this kind of work in the real world, your boss won't care about your grades, only whether you can do the work or not.
My office hours will generally be after class until every body leaves. I can also get together by appointment. I expect to be here a little before class most days as well.
You can call me at home any day between 9:00 AM and about 11:00 PM. I don't check email every 10 minutes so if you send me something and you need a quick response, it is best to send it and then call me. Most questions about why something doesn't work will have me asking you to email the files, so you should do that first.
I give grades based on the total points you get. The standard DePaul breakdown applies. We will have a midterm and final, probably some quizzes and homework. Mostly multiple guess and short answer with some true-false and programming problems. The programming problems are of several types, write some code, fix some code and analyze some code. I will email what I have for scores from time to time. You should check this to make sure that I didn't make any mistakes. Your grade is more important to you than to me, so pay close attention to this.
Please report any errors you find, in the notes, on the website or in the lectures.
If you need to leave class for some reason, go ahead. If you will be gone for some reason, check with me to see about makeup tests etc. If you are concerned about your grade, talk to me as soon as you can. After the final is too late. I have had people do that.