- Headline
- This course has potential
The TAs were uniformly helpful! Thank you so much for all the support.
Much of the material could stand some further proofreading. It would also be nice if there were a sound reference text. An index to the slide notes would be invaluable.
I understand that part of the intent of the course is to learn how to become life-long programming learners - that is, to interact on the forum (analogous to professional collaboration) and research various websites (probably a career-long necessity) in order to add the dimension of autonomous pedagogy to the course outline. Sometimes, however, this seemed like an excuse to give certain subjects short shrift.
Building the Shape classes and associated arrays step by step was easily the best part of the course. This was hands-on work with the absolutely practical nature of constructors and operators, and, to a certain degree, inheritance. I'm sure it's hard to teach programming without resorting to occasional examples that are shallow and contrived, simply because it's too complicated to set up a real-life situation; this felt very much like we were creating something useful, which was good.
Working with the Boost libraries, on the other hand, wasn't such a bundle of joy. It was hard to see what problems the Boost functions, such as variant, were intended to solve. It seemed like Boost mostly made things more complicated; I never understood the point of Variant. The random number generator seemed like a good idea, as did the shared pointer, but their implementation seemed almost more complicated than it was worth. I'm sure I'll get more comfortable with them down the line, but I did wish their introduction had made more sense in the context of the Shape classes we were developing.
By the way, I far prefer the pacing of the Beginning class videos to the way they have been edited for the Advanced class. I know you probably get a lot of feedback that people need to watch the Beginning videos on double speed. I found Dr. Duffy's natural speech rhythms to be perfectly paced to my detailed note-taking. In the Advanced class, I find you have edited out all of the pauses, to the point of sentences running into each other. Dr. Duffy pauses after a sentence in order to let something sink in! (And, occasionally, to sip his tea). Removing those pauses means I continually have to pause the Advanced videos by hand, and often rewind, so I can take notes, which is much more cumbersome and winds up not saving me any time at all.
Thanks!
- Recommendation
- Yes, I would recommend this program to a friend