This course has lectures twice a week, and discussion once a week. You also need to know about the textbook, how to get copies of announcements, handouts, etc.
You are expected to attend lectures and discussion section. If you cannot be there, you must arrange to pick up any handouts or returned homeworks you may have missed, e.g. by coming to office hours.
Some handouts may be hardcopy and some virtual. Virtual handouts will available on the lectures web page.
Announcements, homework hints, etc will be posted on the class newsgroup class.cs373 . Here are instructions for accessing it. You must read the newsgroup regularly (at least once a day). Only particularly important announcements will be duplicated on the course home page. You are encouraged to use the newsgroup to initiate and participate in discussion related to the class. However, students should not post solutions or hints to homework problems.
The official course text is Introduction to the Theory of Computation Michel Sipser 2nd Ed., PWS Publishing Company, 2005. Check out its errata page, which contains a few substantive (as opposed to stylistic) errors.
There are only modest differences between the first and second editions. If you are on a tight budget, a used copy of the first edition should work ok.
Readings from the textbook will be posted on the lectures web page.
Other books you may find useful are:
These texts are on reserve in Grainger Library.
In previous terms the software package JFLAP was used. This package allows you to experiment with the various automata that we will learn in this course. This term we will not be teaching or using it officially.
However, using JFLAP to help solve homework problems or check your solutions is not cheating, unless we explicitly tell you otherwise. However, you should make sure you also end up learning how to work these problems by hand, because you'll need to be able to do this on quizzes and exams.