7th Week of Class

    Last week was pretty exciting in that we finally had our first test! I feel like it ended up being a lot easier than I anticipated, but since I haven’t gotten a grade back, I am not entirely sure. I think the ease of the test had to do with the two things: the fact that I spent the better part of a week preparing, going over old notes and quizzes, and that Prof. Downing let us bring in a cheat sheet for use during the test. The page was only a standard 8 x 11 sheet of printer paper, but you’d be surprised at the amount of information that you can cram on each side of the paper if you use a size 10 font. I think I managed pretty much every piece of material that was covered in class leading up to the exam. I was so proud of my cramming skills, that I think it would be easy for anyone to see just how disappointed I was when I only ended up using about a fourth of the information I had written down. Despite what I believe to be an overall success though, there were still a few parts of the test I had difficulty with. Most of these involved the input and output streams in C++. Coming from a mostly Java-based background, I do not really have a lot experience with these, hence my trouble. Regardless, after all was said and done, I like to think I came out on top.

    Details about project 3 were also released in the past few days, following the exam on Thursday. I haven’t had a chance to look at them in too much detail, but I can’t say I properly understand what I have seen. It looks like we’ll be writing an allocator class almost from scratch. This will likely involve some sort of memory management, judging from some of the function names. This makes me a bit nervous as I am not terribly great at working with manually handling memory, but at the very least it will be a good chance for practice.