Module Overview

This week you will learn how written specifications help software developers to communicate with their clients as well as with each other. We will use Unicode as a case study, because Unicode is a large and complex specification whose basic concepts will be relevant to many software projects.

Course Map

The top row of the course map shows the main themes of the course. Underneath each theme are big ideas that contribute to that theme. For each week of the course, the themes and ideas of that week are outlined in red.

Readings

Read these chapters from Paul Ford's What is Code?

• Chapter 1: The Man in the Taupe Blazer
• Chapter 2: Let's Begin

Resources

• Wikipedia article on Requirement
• Wikipedia article on Specification (Technical Standard)
• The Unicode Standard
  • Frequently Asked Questions
    • Basic Questions
    • Programming Issues
    • UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 & BOM
    • Normalization
• SRFI 135: Immutable Texts
• slides on Unicode
• slides on phases of software development

Lessons

1. Case Study: Unicode

Homework Assignments

Assignment 1: a simple function on Unicode strings