SLOG Week #1

SLOG Week #1

So it begins, the first SLOG post of many. Firstly, hello to whomever is reading this, I hope you enjoy this post and I'll try not to ramble (my main issue when it comes to writing). 

So far my impressions of this class are really good (and I'm not just saying that because I know the teaching staff is reading). The professor seems really nice and I thought it was nice how she made us introduce ourselves to our seat neighbours as before that I didn't know anyone in the class. I'm not saying this just to suck up but in my first year I honestly haven't met a computer science professor that wasn't likeable.

I've started on chapter one of the course readings. The language in the notes is pretty easy to comprehend and I found that my usual method of tackling readings (reading and then writing down notes, and then going over those notes highlighting the important parts), is working and I'm absorbing the information pretty well.

At section 1.1 I got super distracted because I'd never used the turtle class before and it's ridiculously fun to play with. I spent about an hour messing around with it before getting back to the course readings. 

Section 1.2 introduced abstract data types (ADTs) which were a little hard to wrap my head around initially but after reading the description carefully a couple times and trying to explain it in my own words I got it. The example of stacks really helped me a lot. I found it was a lot easier to explain ADTs to myself in the context of stacks.

In class I didn't have much difficulty understanding the lectures. The concepts are pretty easy for me right now, which makes sense as it is the beginning of the year so that's usually when the concepts are the easiest.
My biggest issue right now is probably that I don't remember all the vocabulary from last semester. It was easy to get by without learning it so I only really have a rough grasp of the technical terms. For example, parsing. I completely knew what it was and how to use it but I just did not know the proper name for it. Same thing with the word "delimiter". To solve this problem I've started to look up and write down the definitions of words I don't recognize that are used in the readings and in class and I'm learning them reasonably quickly.