J Course: Advanced Programming for Beginners

J/apl/K

J and K are daughter languages of APL, developed by Dr. Ken Iverson in 1964.

He won a Turing award for his work and became a "fellow" at IBM.

Every Wednesday and Saturday at 5pm I teach a J course on Google hangout. I don't teach K right now since it costs $1 million a copy but it does boast that Kdb is the fastest database in the world by 3 orders of magnitude.

This family of languages J/apl/K are languages developed by mathematicians for mathematicians.

They are useful for doing proofs, as with Mathematica and Maple, but they have the capacity for high performance production systems.

Go to kx.com and you will see the list of major world players who have paid the $1 million a copy because they need the performance.

A small number of companies that lead the world in their fields use this technology and dominate their industries.

I teach J because it is very similar to K but free and open source.

You will develop programming powers using this advanced technology far greater than anything you have seen in your programming careers.

You can hold me to this promise.

I look forward to meeting you online on Google Hangout.

Please email me your gmail ID so I can send you an invitation.

In preparation for an online class please follow the links below to prepare and do some home study.

I look forward to seeing you online at Google Hangout.

All the best....Dan King

ASSIGNMENTS

• Please download and install J on your personal machines. Since only

http://www.jsoftware.com/stable.htm

Please follow the installation and download links there for a Windows install.

• For Linux users please let me know what flavour you are using. We have had to adapt the installation instructions as they vary between Red Hat and Ubuntu.

• You can use the Primer

http://www.jsoftware.com/help/primer/contents.htm

to start your J training. Other resources may also show up a little later.

• This page has the tools to get you started

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Guides/Getting%20Started

• This is also a good map for starting up.

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/NuVoc

• You must review the "Absolutely Essential Terms"

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Vocabulary/AET

for your first class

• we will begin to work on the problem set for the Canadian Computing Championships starting with the junior problems and working backwards 2014, 2013..... and then we will start the senior problems in the same order.

Canadian Computing Championships

http://cemc.math.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html

Go to the bottom of the page to get the CCC section, Canadian Computing Championships

"Problems, Tests and Solutions"

Please look at the following:

• Stage 1 - Junior problems

• Stage 2 - Day 1 leave until later

• Stage 2 - Day 2 leave until later

For comparison the Unofficial Solutions to CCC are here (written in Python)

http://mmhs.ca/ccc/index.htm

You are best off if you go through the entire J Primer first

http://www.jsoftware.com/help/primer/contents.htm

to prepare you for doing these problems.

Please email me your gmail ID if I don't already have it.

To get on to Google Hangout press the red G+ on the menu inside the Chrome or Chromium browsers and click on the double quote icon top right to get into Google Hangout.

See you online.....Dan King c 416-655-2329