My name is David Schneider-Joseph. My email address is david@davidsj.com and my phone number is (781) 799-4540. Please send me any requests for help with homework or in understanding the material.
The office hour will be held each week (except the first) before class at 4 PM, in Science Center 101e. If you need help at any other time, you can email me, or we can arrange a time to talk via phone or instant message. See my contact information above to do so.
You'll want a good Common Lisp environment to do your work in, either on your own machine or on Harvard's. The best environment by far is SLIME (the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs), which reproduces some of the power of the old Lisp Machines. Also, if you're not yet familiar with Emacs, I think you'll find it to be a peerless tool even when not working in SLIME or on Lisp.
The downside is that Emacs has a very steep learning curve. To help with this, there is a distribution called Lispbox which has everything you need to get started in SLIME without any fuss. Alternatively, you may find the LispWorks IDE to be more like other programming environments that you have used. The free Personal Edition has some limitations but should suffice for all coursework.
I learned from Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp, a nicely-organized presentation of the language. Paul Graham's On Lisp is a more theoretical work which is very interesting.
For symbol reference, use the Common Lisp HyperSpec.
Go to the StarLogo site to download StarLogo or view the documentation.
You'll need a FAS Unix/email account to submit your homework electronically.
A secure shell (SSH) program is necessary for connecting to your Harvard account remotely, and a secure FTP program for uploading and downloading files. If you're using Windows, PuTTY and PSFTP have what you need. If you're using a UNIX-like operating system (including Mac OS X, Linux, or Cygwin), ssh and sftp are probably already installed on your computer.
