CSE 541 Course Notes

We will cover most of Chapters 1-7 and 13 in the book. The 5th edition of the text is required, as homework will be assigned from this edition. Errata for the textbook from the authors can be found here. Additionally, I will add my own personal biases:

On page 49, the book states "When numbers are converted between decimal and binary form by hand, it is convenient to use octal representations as an intermediate step". This is fine for numbers, but do not apply this to floating point representations in the next section. For floating point bit representations, this statement does not hold, and after grading many an exam asking the student to do just this, I can attest that there is a disproportionally higher percentage of students who miss this question if they attempt to use octal or hexadecimal formats. Only do this for integers!!! It also is not any more enlighting to see a 32-bit floating point number representation in an octal string format. Remember, that you first want to split the bits apart into the three integers s, e, and m.

In the Introduction, page 1
- add about x=0, after the third word.
- add about x=0, before ln[(1+x)...
- add for x=1/3, after ...(1-x)]

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Course Notes (PowerPoint Slides)

Last updated Monday, March 17, 2008