I've always thought of myself as a pretty good reader. Not the kind to skim over things. I mean, if you quoted a sentence from a book I'd read recently, I'd probably be able to tell you the context and about where on the page it appeared. Lawl. Not so with this stuff.
I think what we have here is a case of Ty not having the necessary frames of reference to keep his information neatly organized and vaguely memorizable. It's such a relief to see any reference to Python or Java in the book, because I have some semblance of an ability to retain such things. When we start launching into COBOL, Fortran, C, F#... really anything but Python or Java... there's just no hope.
Some BASIC might even be welcome at this point, given our recent firsthand experience.
Is this just me? Anyone else having these kinds of issues? This isn't just cuz I haven't had 221, is it?
Anyways. Blergh. Doing my best.
I enjoyed learning about some of the data types (namely Heap-Dynamic Arrays, Associative Arrays, Records, Tuples, and Lists) that we'd become accustomed to using in our programming, and I feel like I could remember the stuff. ("Associative Arrays. Okay, that's like a HashMap in Java or a dictionary in Python. Sweet." Stuff like that helps. Frames of reference!)
Also, 6.11 was pretty great. I wish it had come a little sooner. But it helped a lot with understanding all this hooplah about the mysterious "heap." And pointers, for which I seem to have acquired, through mere proximity to the rest of you folks, the ubiquitous communal fear.
You're not alone, I'm having the same kinds of issues.
ReplyDeleteI had the same feeling when I was in 221, except possibly worse. I felt like it was basically being taught in another language (that's not a pun because we were using C or MIPS, i mean it like it was being taught in arabic...) And i think once you get more familiar with the terminology and hearing certain things over and over and over and over it starts to click.
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