Code Heaven

     Time flies, I cannot believe that we come to the end of semester this fast. Compared to the previous week, I feel like I have a more profound understanding of linked list. During week 4, linked list was exposed to me for the first time. At that time, I was totally clueless about this new field. The only idea about it was this is a more advanced version of built-in list. It is faster to delete items from or add new items to itself. However, I have no idea about why. The reason was mysterious back to few weeks before.

     Nevertheless, after assignment 2 and many other practice, I have a deeper insight into it. Basically, constructing a linked list is equal to setting up reference between different nodes. A complete linked list is actually a track from the first node in the list to the last one. Each node points to the other one until none left. In this way, we do not need to store all the items contiguously since we built reference for all of them, which is different from built-in list. This structure is also the reason that manipulation such as inserting or removing can be acted on linked list much more easily. However, there are also some disadvantages coming with this structure. For example, linked list uses more memory since it needs to store all its pointers. Also because of the way it stores its nodes, it takes more time to access to individual item inside the list.

     Besides, I found both tree and binary tree are the mutation of linked list. The only difference is linked list has only one pointer for each node, while the other two have more. The basic concept is very similar here. In assignment 2, we were asked to find the solution, which is a node, to given puzzle. That solution node is exactly a doubly linked list with reference both sides. 

       Recently one of the main concepts we are learning is recursion. Just as I mentioned in last week slog, it is not a friendly concept for the people who have never seen it before. The most confusing part regards to it is to track the whole thing. More depth it goes into, more difficulty you need to overcome while keeping the track. In addition, I was also clueless about in which situation should we call recursion.  

       However, as the old saying goes, “Practice makes perfect.” Through the class and the lab, I saw many recursion examples and used it to complement a few functions. With all these things being done these days, I feel a little more confident about how to use it. Basically, we separate the body into two parts, base case and general case, by using if statement. In base case we return what we want and in general case we do some recursion calls. To track the whole thing, writing down each step would make it easier since tracking process is more clear in that way.  

      The very first impression of csc148 is it’s a advanced version of csc108. It enhances what we learned in 108 and adds some extra knowledge to help us improve our coding ability on python. After I saw assignment 1, I kind of feel like it is a course where we can learn something to solve the problem in our real life, which makes me very excited.  

     Speaking of goals in this course, for me, fully understanding and mastering what we will learn in the future is essential and important. Besides, it would be greater if I can actually use the knowledge from this course to make my life easier by writing some useful programs.