Hank Hill

Progress Report for Week of October 4-8

First off, I apologize for my late submittal of this letter.  Somehow, I got carried away with my parents being here on Friday and I forget to send you my report.  I apologize, and hope that you will accept this letter a few days late.

This week was a nice, calm week in computer science for me.  Class was interesting and reaffirmed my knowledge in a number of areas.  Namely, internal and external method calls.  By addressing my progress report question in class, I now have a clear understanding of the two method call processes and a better idea of how classes interact with each other.  I can now see how the information hiding concept will be very important as we start building programs that call on numerous classes.

The topic of name overloading is interesting to me.  I few times in the early labs, I considered what different names I could give variables, and it crossed my mind how sometime, there is just one word or description for what you want to convey.  Now, working with multiple classes at the same time, by using the "this" operator, I'm able to duplicate these one-of-a-kind names and apply them in different places.

Lucky for me, I'm a neat freak when it comes to computers.  For example, when I write papers, it is very important to me that the words look well formatted on the page, and so forth.  This is a skill that is needed and encouraged in programming, so I guess I'm in the right place.  I did find out that it was important this week in lab.  When Dale and I were writing our code, we noticed that when writing multiple conditionals, sometimes that were nested within each other, it became important to have those indentations so you could keep track of what statements went with each other.

Finally, the most valuable skill that I picked up this week was how to program with a partner.  At first, I thought it would just be awkward trying to explain my logic to others, but as I found out, by talking everything out with another person, I got problems solved faster by externalizing everything I was doing.  Also, by thinking the problem out together before jumping into the code, we figured out what the hitches would be and corrected our plan before we launched into messing with the code.  This will be crucial as we start our projects this week.  Because we are starting from scratch, forward planning will be essential to our success, or well will end up creating classes that don't relate to each other and don't interact correctly.

One thing that I could use a little help on is in the shorthand notations that are used.  It seems like the book just starts using them with little or no explanation.  I don't mind asking in class, but maybe in the future, when a new shorthand method is used, you could just plan on covering it in lecture.

Also, though many in the class would probably disagree with me, I really enjoy doing some activities on my own.  I was just wondering when the next solo lab would be.  I realize the point in doing the work with a partner, and even I really think it helps the whole thinking process, but I wouldn't mind some solo projects sometime...  We'll see.

Otherwise, all is well.  Wish me happy coding this weekend.  It really should be a good time...  :-)  Until next week...