Reading Week

Hey Guys,

So even though I know I am not supposed to be posting Slogs during Reading Week. These have kind of become an addiction and I wanted to take this time to write a very Informal Slog as we are not being graded for it. Have a Great Reading Week!

Cheers.

Week 6 - A1 Submission and Trees

Phew! We made the deadline for A1 in time and submitted it with the best of our abilities. We were all quite satisfied with the work we had produced as a team and had tried to pay utmost attention to the minute details of the project in order to secure a good grade.

This week in class we were introduced with a new topic 'Trees'. It may be just a standalone topic or a subtopic of Recursion as the basic idea of Trees requires the use of Recursion. The classes were quite intuitive and required a lot of attention given the timings of my classes. If your brain wandered into your thoughts for just a few seconds, it would tend be quite difficult to be on par with the professor's invaluable speech. Trees required quite a lot of practice for you to understand how they worked and after a few hours with some of my friends it was rather easier to be able trace the orders of the Trees.

If you have been a regular reader of my Slogs, you would have noticed that I am a very average student in the field of Computer Science and find it rather quite very challenging. The only way I found it possible to be able to keep up with the staggering pace of this class was noticing how important it was to attend class, having a look at the readings given before the class and going over the annotated slides towards the end of the week.

Week 5 - Recursion, Recursion and More Recursion

This week was quite easy going in the learning category as no new topics were introduced. There were more applications of Recursion, as we learnt how a classic problem called The Tower of Hanoi could be solved using the magical powers of Recursion. I guess I have finally started to give in; into the wonderful capabilities of the world of Recursion. A problem that would generally take hours to solve by hand or using an inefficient code could be solved with ease by our good old Recursive friend.

The pressure is building on as the deadline of our first Assignment in this course draws to a close. Fortunately, I was able to team up with very capable peers from my class and we tackled every problem as a team. This is when I truly understood the powers of teamwork. Working alone would have been a nightmare and this way I got to know my peers in a better manner. When we started the assignment I was rather very scared thinking the assignment would be very open ended as A3 of CSC 108, but it really wasn't. It was very well structured for the first part and we were also given Doctstrings for most of the functions.

PS: To those who find time to read this Blog, and if you are one of those who debate over working alone or not, Choose a Partner and take my word on this YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT!

Recursion

At the start of the CSC 148 course, we were given a brief preview of recursion and I thought that this wasn't the kind of course I had signed up for. I was mistaken about the easy going work load of CSC 108 to be continued into the adventures of CSC 148. I was very wrong!!!

After going through a very hard time trying to understand the very basic idea of Stacks, I was petrified at the glimpse of Recursion. We had never seen the calling of a function definition inside the body of a function before. My initial thought at this as I blurted out a few words in confusion was How Was This Loop Ever Going To STOP? Towards the end of the class, my fear had subsided and I started to gather a sense of perspective of what a Recursive function actually meant. The first process required in the establishment of a Recursive Function is the stopping function which would exit the infinite loop. Overall, it was a new peak into the ever growing difficultly levels of Computer Science.

Object Oriented Programming

Having no previous background of programming, every class seems to be a greater learning experience into the world of computer programming. CSC108 in the fall was quite easy going, but CSC 148 seems to quite a fast-paced course. In class we’ve learnt a number of special operations in Python which simplify the process of coding and something quite amazing learnt this week was ‘Being Lazy is Great!’. The built-in object and methods in Python help create shorter and easy to understand lines of code which are beneficial to the programmer and the reader. Also, it is quite important to avoid repetitive coding because if an error is made while coding, it would have to be corrected at multiple locations which would be quite time consuming.

Something that has been quite a struggle to understand is the basic idea of Raising Exceptions in various cases. The mentality and line of reasoning that goes with Computer Programming on the whole is something I lack and happens to be quite challenging understanding slightly difficult concepts. It is quite hard to understand the different scenarios under which Exceptions are to be raised. It is quite a task to understand the working of definitions and the integration of Class among one another. I chose Computer Science due to my passion for computers and find it to be a really good integration with business, which I would be majoring in. It would help me deepen my understanding on the working of computers and various softwares. One of achievements I had this week was successfully completing the first exercise on my own without any aid.