Mid-Semester Review

I've been really slipping here lately when it comes to blog posts, although I'll try fix that from now on.

For now, I think I'd like to briefly discuss the course up until this point (about 50%-60% into the course I guess?). So far, I've been doing pretty well in the course (although I'm a little worried about the last project). Even better, I feel like I've been learning a lot. As usual from a Downing course, some of the lessons seem to cover some relatively obscure ideas, but in the end, there is a payoff. For example, the lessons about the Allocator and the Heap/Stack arrays helped to teach us about how memory gets allocated to our programs. Sometimes, the point isn't to actually use what is taught in class, but simply to understand what is going on (e.g., we saw arrays being allocated/deleted, but in practice, we'd want to use vectors).

Of course, as I read in another blog, I probably wouldn't mind maybe a little more OOP-specific stuff. I enjoy learning about C++ (probably enjoy it as much if not more than learning OOP concepts), but I do wonder how the rest of the course will be. I'm assuming we'll definitely get to the OOP stuff eventually (looks like we might get to classes and inheritance soon). Although looking at the remaining examples, it seems like it might be difficult to cover them all before the end of the semester (ugh...test 3 will be fun to study for).

I'm somewhat disappointed by the lack of reading assignments lately...ACK! Did I just say that?!

Seriously, I think it was kind of nice to do a little outside reading from time to time. Nothing crazy (60+ pages a day or anything), but just a little reading every week to supplement the lectures. I think the last reading I did for the class was about 4 weeks ago (I accidentally read Ch.4 in the OOP book a little too early), not counting any review I did for Test 2. And actually...I think I just skimmed Ch.4 since it seemed to review some concepts I'm relatively familiar with. *Edit: Granted, I could always read on my own...but what would be the point in that? Just kidding...think I probably will do that, if not now then after the semester is over (skim/read parts of the OOP book we didn't cover in class). Readings similar to the papers might be hard to find though, and I have enjoyed those (especially the last two papers).*

I think that's about all I have to say for now, but as I said at the beginning, I'll probably try to post a few more blog posts in the near future.

Correction on Earlier Post (Eclipse vs NetBeans)

In an earlier blog post, I was mentioning how I was trying out the NetBeans IDE, partly because I believed it had some features that Eclipse didn't offer (or at least didn't offer as easily). While that was more or less true for the versions tried out, it doesn't seem to be the case for the latest versions.

The version of Eclipse I was running is the one that Ubuntu seems to install by default. I forgot what version it is, but it is pretty old. The version is prior to the new naming conventions of the Eclipse IDEs (Europa, Ganymede, etc.). Of course, this was the case for the NetBeans IDE I installed too, but it wasn't as big of a deal (I had 6.1, and the latest was 6.5).

This past weekend, I decided to manually install the newest versions of Eclipse and NetBeans. After doing this, it became apparent that the newer/newest versions of Eclipse do indeed have support for SVN, UML, etc., via plugins or whatever, similar to NetBeans. This was my original assumption, which is why I was a little surprised that I didn't see those options in my original version of Eclipse. Of course, I'm not sure why Eclipse didn't try to tell me to upgrade to a newer version, but whatever...

So in conclusion...these IDEs are really similar. I'm sure each does some things better than the other, but I was actually somewhat surprised at how alike they are. After working with NetBeans for while (well, not that long), I can't really see too much reason to stick with it. Or, conversely, any reason why I should go back to Eclipse (other than familiarity). I think it more or less comes down to how much you like the interface for each one.