I had one of those weeks where life got in the way of education. I’m not ready to talk about it here, so I’ll share some of the engineer related things that did happen. I ordered two books that I’m really excited about reading. I ordered “To Engineer is Human” by Henry Petroski and “Code” by Charles Petzold. Look forward to book reviews on these two in the coming weeks.
In my programming class, we’re finally starting to get beyond the programs that print “Hello World!” on the screen. Some of the programs we’re making now are actually useful! Our last assignment was an assignment to teach loops that had to accept an unknown number of inputs and calculate the mean, standard deviation, maximum, minimum and SEOM. Of course all of these things could be done in something like Excel, but this program had a real purpose.
The only foundation course that I’m wishing I had done before this semester is logic. I didn’t realize how integral logic is to programming and apparently later on in systems. So, does anyone have any suggestions for a great beginner book on logic? Obviously, the stuff we’re currently working on is pretty self-explanatory but I can just sense that it will begin to obfuscate itself.
My math professor handed out a short survey with our last homework assignment and I was pretty surprised with the sentiment of many of my classmates. A majority of them were griping about the pace of the class being too fast, the professor not explaining her examples and also that the class was “worthless.” My only complaint was that the book was pretty terrible but the professor herself has said this many times and often provides lengthy online notes to supplement the book. I’ve found the class to be very useful, taking principles from calculus III and taking them to the next level. She expects quite a bit from us but is also really good at explaining things in a way that my brain just “gets it.”
Still looming, the group project. Ugh. Thankfully, it’s a small portion of our grade so even if it turns out a little iffy, I’ll still be okay grade-wise. I just want it to be over. I like to work in teams and I consider myself a good team-player but this particular project is difficult because of the varied commitment levels of all the members. Again, we’ll see how this plays out.
I will have to see if I can remember what book we used for my Logic class in undergrad. It was a long time ago, but I remember that the book was really helpful. The course was cross-listed in Philosophy and Math and a pre-law requirement. It was taught by a Philosophy prof, and I think it should have been taught by someone from the Math department, as far as breaking down and explaining concepts goes (that might have been my math-phobic self though, ha!).