Better Informatics - 1st year

General handbook Edit on GitHub

don’t stress yourself out too much, first year doesn’t count towards your degree

• LaundryView
• Common Outside Course Options for Informatics Students
• Year 1 Google Drive
• mailing list archives - ug1-students
• if you have a learning disability go to the disability service! make sure you go there long before the exams, it only takes few hours and can help you quite a bit.
• Programming Club
• InfBase: a drop in helpdesk for you to get additional tutoring and support with your courses. See the schedule here - there’s no need to sign up, just drop in

Calculus and Algebra Fundamentals for Informatics drps Edit on GitHub

Until 2024, a similar course called “Calculus and its Applications” ran. That course was mandatory for all Informatics students and ran in Sem 2.

CAFI on the other hand runs in Semester 1 and is only mandatory for those without an advanced maths background in high school. Beware when using checking old exams or other people’s notes!

• Fox’s notes (src)
• Cheat sheet PDFs of the definitions and theorems to save you time in the exam (no need to search through the textbook)
• SympyGamma - a tool similar to WolframAlpha, but also offering explanation for derivations.
• Answers for Essential calculus
• Riemann sums online calculator
• Lots of formulae
• Amazing mindmap
• Tests of Convergence: cheat sheet, flow chart
• Not All Things CAP - better cap cheat sheet

Cognitive Science | drps, info, papers April/May exam Edit on GitHub

• Book about neural networks - recommended by the lecturer
• 3Blue1Brown - really clear videos explaining neural networks and backprop
• Visualising Clustering - video from Google
• Deduction vs Induction
• Word learning models - concept map with key ideas
• Amazing flash cards - key definitions
• Full course notes and posters - 2018

Priority reading list

All of the readings are examinable, but if you want to prioritise, here is the recommended order:

• Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7 of Pinker’s “Words and Rules”, minus places where there’s no relevance to lecture content
• Chapter 4 of Harley’s “Psychology of Language”
• Any academic paper covering something you’re not sure you fully understand. For example, if you’re not 100% clear on perceptrons, have a look at the Gurney reading

INF1A - Functional Programming | drps, info None exam Edit on GitHub

• Tip by a tutor for the final exam: the exam is open book, so taking in a copy of the previous year’s exam paper and solutions may be beneficial
• Past papers
• Exam allocations
• Tree traversal algorithms (view in desktop mode!)
• Learn You A Haskell (official online book, downloadable for exam)
• Basic/library function list, Handy basic function cheat sheet
• Troubleshooting for Haskell (including Haskell-mode on Emacs)
• Functional Programming blog/tutorials by Kyle Cotton
• Articles on Recursion and List Comprehension by Eric Janto

INF1A - Logic | drps, info None exam Edit on GitHub

• Solution to the original 4d on the take home exam
• The venn diagram generator (based on the official version)
• Definitions (also available on Quizlet)
• CNF cheat sheet
• Propositional formula to CNF converter
• boolexman (boolean expression manipulator)
• Visualizing satisfiability, validity & entailment
• Soundness and Completeness
• Finite State Machines
  • FSM Workbench (also contains subset construction)
  • simulator, regex/automaton converter
• Regular Expressions
  • regex/automaton converter
  • Learn Regex Interactively
  • Learn Regex The Easy Way
  • Learn about regular expressions (has a great cheatsheet)

Linear Algebra 1 drps Edit on GitHub

Until 2024, a similar course called “Introduction to Linear Algebra” ran. Not everything is the same since the change to “Linear Algebra 1”. Beware when using checking old exams or other people’s notes!

• Poole textbook: The Nicolson textbook is fairly hard to learn from, so it may be worth finding a copy of David Poole’s Linear Algebra: A Modern Introduction, as it is much better at explaining concepts.
• No bullshit concept maps good for seeing the big picture in the course
• Linear algebra explained in 4 pages good resource to give you general idea. Might be worthwhile to go through it before the start of the course.
• Explanatory videos from Mathapptician
• Khan Academy videos
• Essence of Linear Algebra (videos) by 3blue1brown - covers a large part of the course and gives greatly intuitive ways of understanding what the formulae really represent
• Answers for Poole (3rd edition, 4th edition)
• Symbolab has extremely good support for linear algebra operations (and is great with other areas of maths too)
• Cheat sheet PDFs of the definitions and theorems to save you time in the exam (no need to search through the textbook)
• Not All Things ILA - better ila cheat sheet

Object Oriented Programming | drps, info None exam Edit on GitHub

• Online book
• Enable auto complete on Eclipse
• Past papers, and their additional files
• Some past paper answers
• Automarker service - use this to mark your past papers
• Lambda functions tutorial

Proofs and Problem Solving Edit on GitHub

• Printable notes with all of the course material
• Twelvefold way for combinatorics problems.
• Learning how to use sagemath may come in handy for checking your answers in later parts of the course (especially for modular arithmetic and permutations)
• The course will follow the book A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics, by Martin Liebeck, 4th Ed. 015, CRC Press, £25.99
• To pass the course you must achieve an average of more than 40% AND at least 40% in the examination.
• Cheatsheet with all the notations, definitions, theorems, propositions, and examples from the textbook (condensed into 38 pages) grouped by sections: pdf, source