Week 1 - CS378

Aah haa, the class had just started and the first week is already over. Oh! And what a class strength, quite contrary to what I expected. The time I was registering for the course, I along with other students was skeptic if we'll have the privilege of continuing with the class. And now, the class is full of inquisitive students, and the interesting interaction with so much to learn. As Professor Downing mentioned, learning is a continuous process.

I have had few programming classes before, but the concepts that I have started to learn from the day 1 of class I had no idea of those before. The fundamentals of l-value and r-value, the return types, and return values are now much more clear. The quizzes that started from the second class helped me a lot to understand the material that was taught in the previous class.

During the first week, we got our first project which was to be done collaboratively with other partner. The first project itself prooved to be an excellent source of learning a whole new paradigm of programming aspects, and software management. It was the first time, I was exposed to Google Projects, and working with subversion and issue tracking. As a part of the project, we were to build the unit test cases as well. I was quite surprised as how assertion and unit cases can disclose some obscure bugs that would otherwise have been so difficult to track and debug.

In the last classes, we learned about formatting, and other subtleties of C++. We started with a topic on throwing exceptions, and we’ll be continuing with it the coming week. I definitely look forward to the following weeks.