Questions added in January:
- Past papers: Sorry, there are no past papers because
the module has never been taught at Napier before.
- What books to use for revision?
There should be a few books for this module on reserve in the library
(eg the Learning Perl book). But I am not sure how you would use them
for revision because they are more reference books than textbooks.
I would probably recommend to go over some of the exercises again
instead of reading lots of books.
- Will we have to know the content of the various extra readings?
You should know the concepts which were discussed in the extra readings.
But you will not be asked to recall exactly what author X said in paper Y.
- What are web crawlers? Another word for "web crawler"
is "(robot) spider", which is described under the "Search Tools" link
for week 7.
Exam FAQ
- The exam is an open-book exam. You may use any book and any
handwritten notes.
- You should take the following with you: the lecture notes,
the printouts that were handed out during class and your handwritten
notes. Even though
the lecture notes contain anything you need to know about Perl,
a Perl book could be helpful, especially if it has an index.
There is no need to print other materials.
- You may NOT use electronic devices (e.g. laptops, calculators,
mobile phones etc). If you require electronic devices because of
a disability or other reasons, you need to obtain advance permission.
- You will not be asked to recite facts, but instead you will be
tested with respect to your understanding of the topics. You will
not be asked to write Perl code in the exam.
- I believe the exam is on Jan 12, 2004, 17:30 - 19:30 on
the Sighthill Campus - but you should verify this on the registry website.
- The exam consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 2 essay
questions. Below are some examples of such questions.
An essay question could be about some scenario in some organisation.
For example, an organisation might want to build a website with shopping
carts. You might then be asked to describe how you would implement
such a tool (in broad terms, without writing code). You might be asked
what SSWL technologies you would use
and about security, performance, user aspects, etc of such an application.
(For your revision, you could go through the materials provided for
each week and determine how these apply to these questions.)
Examples of multiple choice questions
(Note: the questions below were originally in the exam, but were then
taken out because they were either too difficult or too easy or not
clear. So, hopefully, the real exam questions are "better" than the
ones below.)
1) What is the output of the following script?
@things = ('poster', 'desk', 'cat', 'dog', 'cat', 'poster',
'dedication', 'chair', 'catalog', 'd', 'manual', 'road', 'rodeo');
foreach $thing (@things){
if ($thing =~ /^d.+/) {$d++;}
if ($thing =~ /.*cat.*.*.*.*$/) {$cats++;}
}
print "There are $d 'D-Words', and $cats cats in the list\n";
a) There are 3 'D-Words', and 4 cats in the list
b) There are 4 'D-Words', and 4 cats in the list
c) There are 4 'D-Words', and 3 cats in the list
d) There are 3 'D-Words', and 3 cats in the list
e) None of the above.
---------------------------------------------------------------
2) Which of the following is equivalent to
while ($first <= $second)?
a) while ($first < $second)
b) until ($first > $second)
c) while ($first >= $second)
d) until ($first <= $second)
e) while ($first == $second)
---------------------------------------------------------------
3) Which of the following techniques can NOT be used for maintaining state
in server-side applications?
a) Cookies can be set on a user's computer.
b) Hidden text can be included in an HTML form and can be passed from one
CGI script to the next.
c) A server-side database which uses IP addresses as keys.
d) If a session ID is generated, information which is associated with
that ID can be stored in server-side files or databases.
e) None of the above.
---------------------------------------------------------------
4) Which of the following is not a server-side web language?
a) Perl using mod_perl on Apache
b) Python/CGI
c) FastCGI
d) Sun Java Server Pages
e) Javascript