Well, I'm only two classes into Prof. Downing's CS371P class, and already I can tell this class is going to be demanding. To be honest, I'm not at all thrilled with his "all or nothing" policy in regards to his coding projects. Basically, this means that your project has to at least produce the correct output in order to even get a grade. Anything else will result in a zero. I understand that grading an incomplete project is more difficult, but I feel that some credit should be given if you've put a decent amount of work into it. But I must digress, on his website Prof. Downing does post the results of his previous class evaluations (something I've never seen any professor do, by the way), and most students seem to agree that he is quite fair in his evaluations so perhaps there is some truth to his grading method.
While we're on the topic of his website, I have to say that I'm pretty impressed by the amount of material he has listed on there to help assist his students. I'll definitely have to dig through some of those papers that are posted up there as well as try out some of the tutorials.
Ultimately, I believe this class will be exceptionally useful. I have some experience coding with C++ from having taken one of the programming language courses offered by the CS department, but I haven't had nearly as much I practice using it as I would like. Luckily, I've heard from previous students that while Prof. Downing may run a tight ship, he's incredibly good at teaching. Thus far, I like the way he's been using the side by side comparisons of C++ with Java code to explain the concepts, equivalencies, and differences, too. It's really helpful in understanding.
Next week we should start learning about caches. This is supposed to related to our first project, but I haven't really looked too much into it. I have requested my GitHub account though, but it takes a few days to be authorized which is kinda lame. I look forward to finally getting started!
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