Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia
Eric. (01)
Your comments are very much appreciated. (02)
It's perhaps appropriate that there are a couple of things I want from
this experience. One is redoing very old calculator programs I made in
Java; those may be good companions for editors and wordprocessors.
Another is to become better attuned mentally to some of the stuff on our
forums. A third is to improve my judgment about course conduct and study
materials. Finally, there is the challenge ... (03)
I'll have to scout for your reference; I'll do some checking locally
tomorrow, on the way to college. You say that java.awt.* is outdated.
That is precisely what we are in: JBuilder + awt + object-oriented
programming all in one go - and without a textbook to support this
approach. All I have a pages of code with some explanations about
control statements and algorithms, which are the very things I don't
need to be told about. (04)
While writing this I received the post from down-under's Stephen. Yes,
your description kind of covers what I am seeing, but things got to link
up at some points here and there. It is interesting that the texts I
have recommend that GUI stuff be delayed to well into the course. The
thing is that in my humble opinion as a retired educator there is just
too much thrown around too fast for comfort for those without OO
background, and that in a junior college. (05)
At any rate, I simply felt compelled to email the instructor that there
is no point in me writing a midterm next week without having had a
chance to study the course material - which is largely absent. Luckily,
my son, who is also attending the course, has OO background. So, I need
not be stuck in the long run - but, damn it!, I want to see decent
course notes and not do some shooting in the dark. (06)
And Stephen, you are darn right about the Alice-in-Wonderland verbiage
authors use. They just don't get tired of drawing parallels with
physical objects that lose their meaning in a maze of spagghetti code. (07)
Thanks for the responses. When I flunk I can say, "There, if it were not
for the grace of God, goes Eric or Stephen." (08)
Henry (09)
P.S. I tried ls -l | grep ....\..*
No joy here. (010)
Eric Armstrong wrote: (011)
>Henry K van Eyken wrote:
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>>..the Java course is challenging me almost beyond endurance.
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>I had a rough time getting a grip on object-oriented concepts. Until I did,
>Java was a total mystery. The first couple of chapters of my book (The
>JBuilder Bible) cover the basics, and the middle chapters cover more
>advanced topics.
>
>Focus on chapters 2, 12, and 13. They capture understandings I was
>able to gather from Allen Holub and Steve Abell, without which I could
>not have made the strides necessary to work with the language.
>
>Unfortunately, the remainder of the book is horribly outdated, as Swing
>is the GUI library du jour (the book uses AWT) and the Collections
>classes beat the heck out of the arrays and vectors I had to use when
>writing.
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>>N.B. Simple sample question from the UNIX exam: give a command to
>>seggregate from a list of files those with four-character names. (By
>>straight file manipulation; no scripts.)
>>
>>
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>Sounds like ls -l | grep ....\..*
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>How close am I?
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> (012)