CSE 132 (Spring 2015)
Midterm Exam Study Guide

Use this study guide to prepare for the midterm exam. Feel free to post and reply to questions on piazza.

• Be sure to read up on the Exam Rules
• Know two's complement. That phrase is used in two ways:
  • As a representation:

    In 4-bit two's complement representation, the integer -3 is represented as 1101.

  • As an operation:

    The two's complement of the bit pattern 1010 is 0110. Do you see why?

  To do well on the exam, you must be comfortable with both uses of the term.
• Be able to show the representation of an integer value using two's complement in a specified number of bits.
• Be able to take the two's complement of a bit pattern.
• Understand why two's complement is a useful way to represent integers.
• Understand how bytes can also represent other things:
  • Color components, as in the RGB model
  • Characters, as in the ASCII encoding
• What does the leftmost bit mean in two's complement?
• Know the idea of software development using Model View Controller (MVC)
  • How do you determine what goes into the model as compared to a view?
  • Why is the MVC paradigm useful?
  • What is PropertyChangeSupport and how does it support MVC?
• What are Threads and why do we use them?
• How do you start a Thread and what does it run?
• How do you wait for a Thread to be finished?
• What is a race condition?
  • Give an example of a good race condition.
  • Give an an example of a bad race condition.
• What is mutual exclusion?
  • When do you use mutual exclusion?
  • How do you implement mutual exclusion in Java?
• What is deadlock?
• How can deadlock be avoided? (Think of at least two ways of doing this)
• How can The Dining Philosophers Problem be solved without a dictator?
• What is a guarded block? Know the two sides to implementing guarded blocks:
  • The side that waits
  • The side that notifiesAll
• Know how to make a sequence of statements appear to execute atomically.