Welcome to Programmer U's Online Pascal Course offered through America Online's
Macintosh Developer Forum, PC Programming Forum, and the Apple // Developers
Forum.

Book:  "Pascal: Problem Solving and Program Design", 3rd edition by Elliot B.
Koffman. Published by Addison Wesley.

Compiler:  Any compiler available for your computer that is capable of
programming in ANS Pascal (standard Pascal)

The layout for the assignments will typically consist of a reading in Koffman's
book followed by a programming assignment to help reinforce the material.  The
reading is important!  Without the reading you won't be able to do the
assignments and then you would be wasting your time here.

I will NOT teach you how to use your Pascal compiler that you have for your
particular computer.  The manuals that come with the compilers usually have a
good tutorial on how to create, edit, and build your programs and we have some of
the best programming forums in the online industry.  What I will teach you is for
the most part considered standard Pascal.  By standard, I mean that if you write
a program on one machine, the source code that you have written can be compiled
on other machines and/or compilers often with no modification to the original
code.

While I post solutions to an assignment when the next assignment is posted, I
strongly suggest that you do the assignment first on your own, THEN look at my
solution and see how I solved the problem.  I don't have a "teachers edition" to
the Koffman book, so I have to sit down and create the solutions just as if I was
taking the class as a student.

Assignments are not graded, and should not be uploaded just to show me that you
have finished it.  If you were paying $$$ for 3 hours of university credit, then
I would be grading everything in sight.

Between the weekly assignments and the weekly conferences you will have enough
information at your disposal to program on your own...which is the goal of this
course.  At the conferences you can and should ask questions (I love questions!)
because I hate to just do a straight lecture.  I tend to slip "goodies" inbetween
questions.  Usually these goodies are enough to generate a few more questions,
and by the end of the conferences we have enough info (tips) to solve whatever
problem was assigned.

I will always answer questions that are posted in the Programmer U Messages area.
 I have created a folder for this class there.  DON'T BE SHY!  I can promise you
that if you have a question to ask there will be plenty of others who either
haven't thought of the question yet or who really want to know the answer...and
this holds true for the online conferences as well!  Don't rely on others to ask
your questions for you...that is a bad way to learn.

So, now that you have decided to take this class and are ready to learn something
in a relaxed atmosphere, go dive in!

See you at the conferences!

---AFA Brian, Macintosh Developers Forum Dean of Programmer U