CS136 Personal Computer Policy

You are welcome to use your own personal computer for all course work required in this course.

However, due to the size of a typical CS136 class (~60 students), we ask that you refrain from asking course staff for technical support for your personal computer. The CS Department at Williams College has several Mac labs available for student use, with TCL 216 and TCL 217 reserved specifically for students taking CS134 and CS136. We employ a full-time systems adminstrator, Mary Bailey, to maintain these machines, and this ensures that all students taking our courses have access to well-maintained, high-performance computers that have all required course software preinstalled.

We think that our limited resources are better spent maintaining our lab environment. Again, you are welcome to use your own machine, but maintaining and configuring your machine will be your own responsibility. Think of this task as a fun challenge that most CS majors are eventually able to complete on their own.

Being able to work on your own machine involves doing two things:

You must install the Oracle Java Software Development Kit (SDK) on your machine. You do not want the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). The difference between the JRE and the SDK is that the SDK comes with tools like a compiler.
You must download and put the bailey.jar library into your Java CLASSPATH. For example, if I download bailey.jar and move it into my Documents folder, then the path to bailey.jar is /Users/dbarowy/Documents/bailey.jar. I must then update my CLASSPATH environment variable. On the Mac, you want to edit the .profile file in your home directory (e.g., /Users/dbarowy/.profile). In my case, I added the following line to .profile:
```
 export CLASSPATH=".:/Users/dbarowy/Documents/bailey.jar"
```