I can't believe it's August 24th already. This summer has really flown by, but almost in a good way because I think I've achieved quite a bit over the past couple of months- finishing my internship, summer school, and all. So here I am with my CPSC 210 marks out, ready to give a review of the course.
CPSC 210 is a second year software construction course focusing on design, testing and debugging of software, using Java. Java is object-oriented programming, which moves us away from what we learnt in CPSC 110 (Racket). However, of course, the basics of programming remains.
I went into this course having worked with OOP, did a couple Java online tutorials and started reading (started not finished haha) a Java book. I didn't prepare too much for the course, but I definitely think it was enough. Because of those tutorials and such, I had a good grasp of not only the syntax but the gist of how Classes, Objects & Methods interacted. That definitely made the course a lot easier to dive right into, especially for a summer class because of how accelerated it is. However, that being said, learning the basics of Java prior to the course is recommended, but not mandatory for success in the course.
For the summer session, we had about an assignment due roughly every 3 days and a lab due every other day. We also had a midterm 2 weeks into the course, a project due about 2 weeks after that and finally, we had our final exam a month after the course started. It's definitely a packed schedule. However, for some reason, it didn't stress me out. I found myself still being able to go to work and hang out with friends without much trouble as the labs and assignments were straightforward as long as you fully knew what you were doing. In addition, the midterm and final were made to be tricky but again, super manageable. Despite us having very little time to work on the 2 phases of the final project- an Android app, it was really fun and for the most part, I was able to finish each phase within one day (a long day but one day nonetheless). Because of that, I found myself truly enjoying the course a lot and I'm almost sad that I didn't take it during the fall because then I could have taken it for longer period of time.
So that's pretty much my review on the course. I love Java as a language and therefore thoroughly enjoyed the course. If you took CPSC 110 and are now contemplating taking 210, you should definitely take it, I promise it's a ton of fun!
