Week #3

In week 3, we learned about Exceptions; what they are and how to use them. I have done Java previously for 3 years, so I know about exceptions, but they work a bit differently in Python. In Java, they are try-catch, but in Python they are try-except, which I find is a bit strange. Usually when someone throws an object, the other person would try to catch it, but in this case, I guess they would "except" it, ha ha.

Any ways, the lab we did this week was also pretty straight forward but fun to do. I finished the lab successfully, which made the day even better. Lectures are also getting more interesting as we are progressing deeper into Python. I mentioned it in the discussion forum of CSC148, but I'll say it again here; I found the "mouth.py" to be quite funny because it reminds of me wanting to be a dentist and a programmer at the same time.

The lectures are not full every time, albeit IB 110 IS a big room. I am wondering if there aren't a lot of students in class or maybe they don't come to class anymore, but the size of the class really decreased lately, a lot of free seats.

Looking forward to seeing what we will be doing in class next week. Hope everyone has a good weekend.

Week #2 of CSC148

Week #2 of CSC148, we went through lectures on stacks and queues. What I found interesting about these two was the efficiency of both is different. Stacks are faster than Queues, assuming that the Queue class's dequeue() method is not optimized, while the Stack class is very easy to optimize.

Besides that, there was a question we did in class about finding the size of a stack. A lot of people found different ways of doing the problem and everyone learned that there were definitely a lot of efficient ways and a lot of not-so-efficient ways. It was a pretty good practice problem for testing what the best and fastest way is of solving a problem.

Last thing we covered in a hurry was the balanced parentheses problem. This problem was a good one as well. It tested our String manipulation skills. I was hoping we had more time to discuss the problem in lecture, because I wanted to see what other people came up with. I'm sure there were a lot of ways of doing it.

Overall, week #2 was excellent and enjoyable. Looking forward to next week's lectures.

Week #1 of CSC148

As of today at 11 AM, the first week of CSC148 is over. This week was mostly review from what was previously learnt in CSC108. Of course for me, it was a review from two years ago, since I took CSC108 in 2012.

The first exercise was posted on the course website and I have already finished it. I haven't programmed in Python for a while, but they were review, so it wasn't too bad.

Still waiting for the MarkUs link to be up so I can submit my SLOG.txt as well as my exercise py files. One thing I like about all CSC courses is the discussion board. It's a really useful thing and a lot of people who are either too shy to ask a TA or instructor directly or are in no position to go to a TA or instructor's office(s) can just post there and get a quick response from other classmates.

So overall, this week has been pretty good and I am interested to see what we will be doing in CSC148 next week.