CSC148

The academic year is almost nearing end and we’re gearing up to go into exam season. I finished off my A2 Demo which went rather well I feel - Preparing for which I realized how important it is to understand and to be able to explain how your code runs. I feel, I learned more about my code myself while preparing for the demo. Now that all the assignments are done and over with, we have the final exam to look forward to and review everything we’ve learned over the semester. 

As the semester is coming to an end, I’ve personally made a lot of progress in the course and learned a lot of new concepts. I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs through the course and put in quite some hours playing around with PyCharm too see all the new concepts in action and just to play around with the to get a better grasp in each concept.

I personally found the concept of Binary Search Trees really interesting and I can see how that concept has developed for me. I’ve come to see how their structure makes searching and inserting algorithms fairly straightforward. Not just focusing on their structure but also their practical use. Back when the topic was initially introduced to me I was wondering what purpose they might have and I thought that sorting could be one of them and as it turns out I was on the right track. As the topic of sorting was initially being introduced, I was overwhelmed by the many different sorting types that exist and wondered why and how come there exists so many. I’ve now seen by the end the use for each one of them by its uniqueness; it’s also clear while merge sort will always be better than selection sort and quick will almost always be better than selection sort. 

We devoted a lot of time this week to working on the 2nd assignment. It definitely looked a lot more easier than we anticipated, however I feel like our group really pulled together and worked really hard on the assignment. Eventually with quite a lot of help from the drop in centre and a lot of sleepless nights I feel like we conquered the assignment.

Other than that we talked about and focused on recursion efficiency this week in the lectures along with the introduction to the Big Oh. We’ve considered several different types of sort, that include insertion sort, bubble sort, selection sort, quick sort and merge sort. They are all useful to sort in different ways however the important factor is the efficiency of each of them; which is measured by the highest order of the variable that effects the outcome. For example, n, the length of a list. When the order of a program’s big-Oh is larger, its runtime will rise more dramatically for a bigger n. The concept is rather easy to grasp and I’ve been following through well till now. Hope to continue this way.

I’ve been exploring with the concept of Binary trees and Binary Search trees this week. Binary Search Trees following the simple structure rule that if they have a node with one certain value, all nodes to the left of this node will have a value lesser than it and all the nodes to its right will have a greater value than this node. this makes finding a particular value in the tree a comparatively easy task. It’s been fun learning about this concept, all the way form learning their structure of arity 2 to their special methods. I found the concept of pre/post and level order a rather easy one to grasp.

I’ve spent a major part of this week working on linked lists and just playing around with the concept to understand it better and get a better grasp at the topic. Concept wise, their major difference from trees being that like list nodes have only one child which result s in a straight line of data known a a list. Over the week and in the labs I’ve got to work on several different implementation functions with linked lists and deducted that the best straightforward route includes recursion methods. We’ve also looked at wrapped classes which are basically meant to be organizational tools.

I’ve also had a look at the assignment 2 for this course and it looks pretty interesting as well as a little intimidating. It definitely requires more work than the first assignment and includes elements from all the concepts we’ve been introduced to recently. Me and my partners are hoping to conquer this just as well as our take on assignment 1.

Through most of our recent classes we’ve gone in depth with the concept of OOP (Object Oriented Programming). OOP allows a particular program to be broken down into many smaller modules or “objects”. For example, in Python a string is an object. In this case, it’s a sequence of characters which have certain characteristics or “attributes”, like their length and also certain functions or “methods” that can be applied to it. One of the biggest advantages of OOP is that it lends itself fantastically to teamwork. When various parts of a program are divided, it allows people to go off and work on a single part, and then in the end, come back and put it all together. In short, OOP allows programmers to abstract ideas from the real world and represent them in a program.

Another new concept we’ve gotten to interact with is of recursion been introduced into our course. Recursion is essentially the idea of breaking a task down into smaller bits, until the pieces of the task are small enough to be solved very easily, and then finding the solution by rebuilding all the solved pieces together. Without this concept, a lot of programming problems can be unnecessarily difficult. Initially I found the concept a little intimidating however I feel by now I’ve comparatively gotten more comfortable with the concept.  I’ve reached a stage where I enjoy playing around with it and find new ways to implement it.

An example of a recursive function would be a function that calculates the nth fibonacci number. If you were asked to find the eighth fibonacci number, you’d have to find out the sixth and seventh numbers? In order for that, you’d have to calculate the fourth and fifth, and then the second and third, and so on. By the end of its implementation we end up with a simple and short solution, as opposed to the mountain of complications a non-recursive solution would entail.

One of the basic uses of recursion can be found in trees. A tree will have some value, and would further have children that are trees with their own children, which are trees, and so on. To find a certain value within a tree, you’d go through the following steps

Look for the search value in this tree’s value.

If you haven’t found the value and the tree has children, look for it in this tree’s children. If there are no children, the value is not in this tree.

Hence, recursion usually leads to very readable, simple, code which can solve seemingly much more complex problems.

I’m glad we got assignment 1 well done and we have that off our plate! I guess we have the next one to look forward to in some time. We have been introduced to the topic of recursion in our lectures and that’s mostly what our lectures revolved around this week. I feel like initially I found the concept a little difficult however I feel like I just need to get some hands on practice with the idea, in which I was helped out by this week’s lab and now I’ve comparatively gotten more comfortable with the concept.

Mostly spent this week concentrating on the first assignment. It was little intimidating at first however with some work on it along with my partners - I feel like we’ve made great progress. I feel like the assignment was really interesting and it was fun to work on it along with my partners despite the initial obstacles.

Other than the assignment, we’ve been making progress in lectures as well. I still feel like the materials covered in class are going at a slightly faster pace than I expected however I’m putting in the extra effort to stay on top of all the areas being covered.

As the weeks pass by, we’re getting more and more experience with advance python and we have begun to approach ideas like abstract data types and understand the concept of classes like Stack. We encountered the concept of ‘Inheriting’ in the last few lectures and also got some experience about the idea of inherit features in the last lab. In our last lab my TA personally helped me understand the concept of raising exceptions which originally I was a little unclear about. I feel like working on these areas in our labs along with the help of our TA really helps us understand the course concept proficiently. 

Coming into CS 148 I had a lot of expectations as I hoped to be pushed out of my comfort zone! The CS 108 prerequisite provided me with a strong base in Python and really helped me advance to the level and provide me with the appropriate skills for this course. We have been through concepts like class design recipe in 108 however we deal with it in a lot more depth in the last few lectures along with further new concepts. 

The materials covered in class are going at a slightly faster pace than I expected however I’m putting in the extra effort to stay on top of all the areas being covered. Going through assignment A1 it is a little overwhelming at this point but hopefully I shall pioneer through it and emerge victorious. I am more than overjoyed to be getting hands on experience with advanced Python and I look forward to conquering a lot more problems through the course and learning many more new things.