Week of January 22, 2014: Queues, stacks, linked lists and general OOP

My first week in csc148 was quite a new experience. To begin with, the first exercise we have done, square_root and classes Dog and Toy were very different from csc108. in csc108, all of the exercises we did were all very simple applications of the concepts we learned in class, the if statements, while loops, for loops, etc.. the square_root function required many of those csc108 concepts integrated into one masterpiece function. The second exercise, classes Dog and Toy, i felt that the point of that exercise is to review all the other concepts not covered in square_root and introduce Object Oriented Programming. According to wikipedia, Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that represents concepts as "objects" that have data fields (attributes that describe the object) and associated procedures known as methods. Objects, which are usually instances of classes, are used to interact with one another to design applications and computer programs." I had to learn the concept from wikipedia after class just to understand what i was doing. E1b (classes Dog and Toy) were done entirely by following the python example in class. But, i do see the point in OOP. to organize functions according to their parent classes, and to call upon them where appropriate. The simplicity behind it is powerful, but using it will take some getting used to. In general, a very good start for me to a very rigorous semester.