Penelope Cruz
CS151 Progress report
September 23, 2005

I can’t say that this week was easy. It is clear that the concepts we are talking about in class are getting more and more complex and difficult to understand. However, I can’t say that I didn’t expect this to happen. Monday and Wednesday I found the concepts about the keyword “this” and scope/lifetime of variables very confusing. This in turn made the lab more difficult. It seams to me that I can grasp most of the major ideas but somehow when put in front of the computer for a lab I don’t know where or how to put them to use. The language used in the readings that we have to do I also find somewhat puzzling.

What helped me the most this week was today’s lecture. I never knew that you had to look at the problem and outline as if it were a paper. I had figured that you just sort of took a stab at it. In any case, I feel pseudo-coding will help me in future labs as well as the project coming up.
After this week I’m still a little fuzzy on the dot notation. Is it only used when evoking another method or is there more to it that that? I also have a pretty clear understanding of internal methods calling other methods of the same class and external methods calling methods of other classes. I am also confident in understanding abstractions and modularization. (I must say the examples of books and maps were very helpful.)