SLOG Entry#5

     How was everyone's Reading Week? Mine was good. Too short, but good. But now its midterm week. That wonderful time where you have midterms and assignments that you were supposed to have been preparing for last week. Yikes. Well, I did my computer science midterm, and compared to some of my other classes, it wasn't that bad. A lot shorter, that's for sure. But this week wasn't all tests this week. There was also education. Specifically, on Monday we covered Linked Lists, trees with exactly one child  and with the last node being empty. A different way of organizing data, Linked Lists are basically lists in tree form. Lots of fun. That was it for this week. Tune in in next time for more computer science.

SLOG Entry#4

     Greeting to all my SLOG blog readers. This week in computer science, we went over Trees. Not the kind of trees you find outside in a park. The Trees we talked about were a special kind of list. A Tree is basically an object that holds a value and points to some other objects that also hold values and also point to some more objects that hold values and so on. We talked about simple Trees, called Binary Trees as each object only pointed to up to two other objects, as they were the easiest to work with. We went over all the terminology one uses when working with Trees and the different methods to traverse them. The last topic specifically used recursion, an important concept we went over with some detail these past few weeks. Trees are an important data structure to know, as it is one of the commonly used Abstract Data Types. That's what I learned about this week. I will not be updating my blog next week sadly, as its Reading Week, not so sadly, so there won't be any lectures to blog about. Tune in in two weeks for more computer science.

SLOG Entry#3

     Here's another SLOG entry. This week, we talked about the Tower of Hanoi, and learned about scopes and namespaces. The Tower of Hanoi is a classical math puzzle that entails moving a stack of disks from one spot to another, one disk at a time. This is a puzzle as bigger disks can't be placed on top of smaller disks. We discussed this classical problem as we must do something similar for Assignment #1. We also talked about scopes. When values are created and referenced to memory addresses, they exist locally, non-locally, or globally. Depending on where the variable is created, it can be overwritten by another variable with the same name, but in a more focused scope. An interesting tidbit, which can be avoided by just giving the variables different name in the first place. That's all for this week. Tune in next week for more computer science!

SLOG Entry#2

     Well here's my weekly SLOG entry. This week, in the wonderful world of computer science, we learned about recursive functions. In layman terms, a recursive function is a function that calls upon itself to accomplish its task. Sounds simple enough, but its an important computer science tool with a wide variety of uses. From the examples we did in class about counting the depth of lists, to complex fractals, recursive programming is a common occurrence in many of the programs we use and love. Or use and hate. I particularly enjoyed the turtle example we were given as watching a recursive animation of lines being drawn is oddly relaxing. Anyway, that's all for this week. Tune in next week for more computer science!

SLOG Entry#1

     I haven't done much computer programming before I took CSC108, but I don't regret my decision to take it. It was a fun course that covered an important skill in the modern world, computer programming. And after three weeks of taking CSC148, I'm still confident I made the right choice in learning how to program. I was taught many interesting concepts in computer science so far, but one of the most interesting would have to be Object-oriented programming. Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm that utilizes objects with associated methods. It's a different style of programming that threw me off my game for a while. It was only after I looked up examples of object-oriented projects that I understood the flexibility and diversity this style of programming offered. It is far more efficient when it comes to larger projects then procedural programming. However, I'm left wondering what other programming paradigms are being used in the industry today?