Asking on the Forum for one of our courses

Please read these short guidelines carefully when you participate in one of our courses. If you ignore them, you risk getting a suboptimal answer or no answer at all. We are eager to help you, but you also have to help us so that we can help you.

Before asking on the forum

1. Spend a few minutes trying to find the error yourself. But don't spend too much time, and ask before you get frustrated and lose motivation

2. When your problem is associated with an error message, first try googling (a suitable part of) that error message. In many cases, this leads to a page on StackOverflow or a similar site with an explanation of the solution.

3. Check the forum of the course if others have already asked the same question. You can just look over the list of topics or use the search function.

Asking on the forum

1. Include a sufficient portion of the error message. Use copy-and-paste and don't rephrase it in your own words.

2. If the error message points to a part of your code, include the relevant code with line numbers. Sometimes more than one line of code is needed to understand what you did. But don't include your whole code!

3. ALWAYS make sure that the version of the code which produces the error is committed to the SVN (without us having to ask first). But don't just say: the code is in the SVN, please find my error. That is NOT how it works. It's just a backup, in case the information you post along with your question is not sufficient for us to help you.

For C++ only

1. If your code behaves unexpectedly, use gdb to find out where your code crashed (in case of a segmentation fault or similar error) or to set a breakpoint (at a suitable position in the code, to find out the values of suitable variables at that position).

2. If you suspect a memory aspect error, use valgrind (very slow) or use the address sanitizer (compile with option -fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer, much faster and often good enough).