Tag: OSU online CS review

OSU eCampus CS492 Mobile Development review and recap

This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.

Six-word summary: BEST COURSE IN THE PROGRAM 🥇

This class rules. Yong Bakos is a fantastic lecturer and course designer. CS 492 is the missing link between all the small-scope student projects you’ve done so far and the much larger, much more complex projects you’ll work on as a professional.

They call it “mobile development” because you’ll do this class’s work in Dart and Flutter, and see your work on a mobile device, but this class grows a ton of skills that are important no matter what you end up working on.

My advice: take this class even if you have no interest in mobile development.

CS492 Review

CS492 is what every class in this program should’ve been.

Every week introduces a batch of lectures that are actually enjoyable and useful. Follow along with the examples and what you build is directly useful for the projects you turn in every 2 weeks.

This class covers a huge range of topics, including:

  • Setting up a development and build environment above and beyond just running a file from the command line
  • Coding style, with concrete examples of what to do and what not to do
  • Working with an SDK
  • Reading and using API docs
  • Refactoring, “code smells”, best practices for structuring methods and projects as a whole
  • Design patterns that you can take to any language
  • Best practices (guards, import order, function design)
  • Actually building something!

I took CS492 the first time it was offered so I have to admit, I was pretty scared. Some OSU classes have taught me to temper my expectations and I was bracing for an uneven workload, messy, unfinished course content, unclear expectations, long-winded 50 minute lectures full of “ums” and mistakes that go uncaught, etc.

I mean, even the courses that have been running for longer than I’ve been a student suffer from all of these problems and they’ve had ample time to clean up, so why wouldn’t a brand new one be more of the same?

None of these things were a problem in CS492.

This class was organized, consistent, and predictable. The lectures are high-res, easy to follow, and enjoyable. You follow along with the professor as he builds a project from scratch. Each lecture is just 4-8 minutes long and covers a specific topic, so you don’t waste time scrubbing through a marathon hour-long lecture for the part you need. Early lectures are followed by a coding exercise built right into Canvas where you can complete a quick ungraded exercise to reinforce what you just learned.

The project grading rubrics were clear. The weekly discussions felt meaningful (for the most part), and I found myself skimming what other people contributed just to see what I could learn from them.

The projects felt like the start of something “real”, and I enjoyed the opportunity to use all the pieces of the framework. Overall, I learned a ton in this class and it was almost entirely smooth sailing.

The only things I didn’t like were:

  1. Initially, new modules unlocked on Mondays instead of Sundays (like almost all the courses do), making it hard to get a running start during the weekend. Many students complained and the instructor running the course (not the same person who recorded the lectures) started unlocking them Friday at midnight. This kind of responsiveness is fantastic. The early-unlocks ended around week 7, when I think the instructor was still editing the pre-recorded lectures. If they improve one thing in this class, I hope they make the next week’s content unlock earlier than Monday.
  2. Initially, the correct answers to the weekly quizzes remained hidden forever. During Week 3, the instructor changed a Canvas setting to release the quiz answers a day after the quizzes were due. Quizzes that just tell you what you got without telling you the right answers so you can learn from them are useless, so I’m glad the instructor listened to reason on this one, too.

I liked that the instructor (who was different from the guy who recorded the lectures) was responsive to student complaints about these things.

I also liked how this class hit the ground running. In the first week you get set up with Flutter and follow a well put-together tutorial that guides you through making a simple app. Wow, a simple app in the first week! The following weeks continue to add complexity, and the end result is a course with a very satisfying “deep dive” feel to it.

CS492 course structure

  • 10 weeks
  • There’s a book but I didn’t get it and managed an A without it
  • Weekly quizzes (took me about an hour apiece, they’re not trivial and there is some wording I would have changed here or there, but they aren’t horrible)
  • Class-wide Canvas-based discussion to post to by Wednesday of each week (the topic changes each week)
  • Response to someone else’s discussion post due by Sunday of each week (the response was usually fairly detailed, ie: write a rebuttal, provide sources, implement a some code to create what the OP was describing, etc.)
  • New material unlocks every Monday – later changed to early Saturday morning, later back to Monday much to everyone’s chagrin in the final weeks
  • 4 projects (the 3rd one was the hardest/most time-consuming, but they were all a fair bit of work)
  • Project submissions are both your code and a 90-120 second video (screen recording) of your project as you quickly step through it to demonstrate it meets the requirements
  • Proctored final exam worth 35% of the grade – note: in my run of the class, the final was changed to unproctored near the end of the quarter due to a lack of testing sites because of COVID-19

I cannot say enough good things about the quality of teaching in CS492.

Take this class. Take this class. Take this class.

Topics covered

  • Many Flutter-specific conventions like Widgets that, while they may seem specific to Flutter, have analogs to other libraries like React
  • Structuring and modularizing a project
  • Asynchronous programming (async/await)
  • Saving data to on-device storage
  • Saving user preferences
  • Hooking up to an external database with Firebase
  • Uploading and retrieving photos to/from cloud storage with Firebase
  • Integration testing in Flutter (lightly covered)
  • Debugging

Time commitment

I took CS492 alone, which gave me time to really dig into everything. I might’ve spent a little less time on it had I paired it with a second class, but every week was very consistent and worked out to about:

  • 3-4 hours watching the lectures, reading the accompanying explanations, and following along with the code (the lectures themselves are maybe 45-70 minutes of content each week but I paused a lot to follow along)
  • 2 hours on the weekly quiz
  • 1-2 hours on my weekly discussion post
  • 1-2 hours on my weekly discussion post reply
  • About 8-10 hours on the current project

That’s about 15-20 hours a week depending on the week. The weeks where projects were due tended to be closer to the “20” end of that spectrum than weeks where projects were introduced. This was mostly because the second week of each project tended to contain the lectures pertaining to the more challenging aspects of the project.

The projects spanned 2 weeks, but lectures unlock weekly, so you could only get through half the project the first week because the second half of lectures wouldn’t unlock until the next week.

For example:

  • Week A – Project assigned, needs Lectures from Week A and Week B to complete, only Lectures A are made available
  • Week B – Lectures B become available, project due at the end of the week

This got irritating at times. At the end of every “Week A” it felt like sitting in a holding pattern all weekend waiting for the second batch of lectures to unlock so I could start the second half of the project, but I always had enough to for the first part of the project and could fill the weekend.

My advice to other students in this holding pattern is to do absolutely everything you can do for the first half of the project in the first week. Leave nothing that could be done in “Week A” for “Week B”, and you’ll be fine.

Recording projects

This was my first class that asked for screen recordings and I was pretty intimidated at first. I do not like being recorded and tend to make a lot of mistakes, get really self-conscious, freeze up, etc. However, much to my relief, you don’t have to record yourself or any kind of voice-over, just your screen.

You just step through the script they provide you and after a few run-throughs you’ll nail it all in one take. I found it helpful to create a doc with an extremely detailed, click by click script to follow and have someone else read it to me. That way I didn’t have to switch between the script and my active recording, and didn’t lose my place so much.

On a Mac, it’s easy to make a screen recording using Quicktime. Just search for Quicktime Player, cancel the default dialog it opens, then right click it to start a new screen recording.

My recordings were usually around 80MB but Canvas accepted them just fine.

CS492’s lectures are fantastic

In general, the lectures in this online CS program are low quality. Many classes have lectures that are poorly paced, unedited, boring, or only loosely related to the assignment you’ll be doing that week.

CS492’s lectures are none of that. They are short, punchy, and purposeful. They’re organized by topic and easy to find later when you need to refer back to one.

You follow along with the lecturer as he codes from scratch, explaining every decision he makes. He gives tons of little tips, too (like “build frequently”, “don’t make a temp variable just to return it in the next line”, etc.) and he explains his reasoning as he splits things into methods.

It’s like getting to pair program with the most senior dev on your team. This screencap is from week 2 and while a lot of what he covered was review for me, I didn’t feel like he was wasting my time. I genuinely enjoyed following along with him.

Yes, I could use a second monitor.

Nothing in this class felt irrelevant. The work felt like real work (like the kind of work you’ll do at a job once you graduate from OSU). Week 2 was the only week that felt like a bit of a rehash (it covers starting a project, wiring up inputs, organizing things into functions, etc.) but it was a good review and it didn’t take up too much time.

(This process of breaking a program down into pieces, setting up the prints, the inputs, breaking it into modules, and reasoning through the project’s could be moved to CS162 where everyone will see it and learn from it early on.)

Whoa, Canvas has a repl?

I hope Canvas’s support for repl.it is a new feature, otherwise I’m going to be seriously salty that every previous class in this program missed this incredible teaching opportunity.

The repl exercises in CS492 aren’t graded, but they’re broken down into little bite-size pieces that take a few minutes to complete and do a great job of reinforcing the current topic.

Honestly, some of these exercises feel like entry level interview questions. I was grateful for the practice.

Even better (I didn’t discover this until Week 3), you can hook up repl.it to your GitHub account and your edits to the repls will be saved.

They’re public, which isn’t how I usually like to store my student work, but keeping organized backups of my work on these exercises was a big help.

Tips for CS492

Set up the Dart SDK and Flutter ahead of time, or at least early. The setup isn’t necessarily straightforward. In my case, it took about 2-3 hours to work through all the missing components of the install (I needed to upgrade RVM, Ruby, install Cocoapods in the right place, read half a dozen Stack Overflows from people with similar problems, etc.) Some people had a harder time than I did. Starting early is a good idea. You’re good to go when running flutter doctor gives you a clean output of checkmarks.

Get a second monitor (or use a second computer) to display the lectures on their own screen. I made it this far in this CS program before I felt like I needed a second monitor. If you can get two screens, do it – the lectures are much more enjoyable if you aren’t flipping between tabs/programs every few seconds.

Week 3 is also when I got clever and started watching the lectures on my PC and following along on my laptop. Not having to flip back and forth between Chrome and Visual Studio Code saved me a lot of time.

Quiz tips: Unlike some classes, the multiple choice options in this class’s quizzes are not obvious joke answers. Here, the wrong answers are often correct in some way, but don’t answer the question that was asked. Pick the answer that is both correct and most accurately answers the question. It’s sometimes subtle and difficult to spot at a glance. This same advice applies to the final.

Mac/MacBook tip: I worked in Android Studio because I liked it best of the options, but I found the Android emulator to run extremely slowly (like 2 frames a second) while the iOS Simulator ran like butter. You can invoke the iOS Simulator from Android Studio, so don’t let the “Android” label scare you off if you’re on a Mac.

Final exam tips: None of the questions were repeats from the quizzes, but reviewing all the quizzes and the writings that accompanied each lecture was time well-spent in preparation.

Due to COVID-19 shutting down so many test sites at the end of the Winter quarter, the final exam was changed to be unproctored. Future versions of this class might go back to a proctored final, but in my humble opinion, they should leave it unproctored.

The exam was still challenging, but since it was open book it felt like one last opportunity to learn something instead of a punitive experience. The questions aren’t readily Googleable and still require in-depth familiarity with the course’s material. I don’t think having access to the course’s material during the exam raised my final exam grade by more than a point or two, and the timed-but-open-book exam (which was still worth 35% of the final grade) felt more in line with the spirit of the class.

If you do face a proctored version of this final, you can take some comfort in knowing that if you paid attention all quarter long, you’ll do fine. Nothing on the exam was a surprise, and there wasn’t anything painful about it (no tracking memory registers by hand, no memorizing formulas and algorithms, no writing code into a blank Canvas form).

Take this class. Even if you have no interest in being a mobile developer, you’ll benefit from working in a more complex, real-world SDK than what previous classes exposed you to. This class also covers a ton of general-purpose topics that will refine your skills and be useful no matter what you do in your CS career.

If this class is indicative of the quality we can expect at OSU periodically revamps this program’s classes, then I’m very optimistic about the quality of OSU’s online CS program in the coming years. CS492 felt like getting to pair program with a senior engineer for a few hours a week, every single week. Thanks for the great class, Professor Bakos.

CS492 is the highest quality course in the OSU program. It does not run every quarter (I took it in Winter 2020) but it is worth waiting (or retooling your schedule) for.

And that’s it! The only class I have left is Capstone next quarter.

PS: Seriously, take this class.

OSU eCampus CS372 Intro to Networking review & recap

This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.

Six-word summary: How the Internet Works: The Class

It’s an evenly-paced, heavy-workload class. It’s predictable (and the grading is sane), but it’s a lot of work and over half of your grade in the class comes from tests. When I think back to this class, I will remember the Canvas test interface. This class is quiz after quiz after quiz after quiz.

I’ve been in the OSU program since 2016, so I’m on the old “two electives” plan that treats CS372 as a required class. Going forward, though, I imagine most people reading this will be considering CS372 as an elective and wondering how it stacks up against other offerings.

CS372 Review

This class is just like CS271 (Assembly) in that it attempts to work you half to death in a subject that probably feels peripheral – if not completely unrelated – to your intended career path.

Every week feels exactly the same. There are about 1.5 hours of lectures to watch, a few book chapters to read, worksheets to do (if you want, they aren’t graded), a graded “summary exercise” you can take twice (they’re like quizzes in that they’re graded, but you get 6 hours to do them so they’re also open-book), and pick one or two of the following: a lab, a project, or a 90-minute quiz. That’s every single week from beginning to end.

You will study things like:

  • How a bit gets from one machine to another (in excruciating detail)
  • Calculate the realtime delays a packet will experience as it traverses a transmission medium
  • Different networking protocols
  • How things like TCP, UDP, HTTP, and email work
  • How delayed a packet will be (in milliseconds!) if the network is such-and-such congested
  • How wireless networking works
  • How a packet gets packaged and split up as it makes its way across the mighty interwebs
  • A brief glance at security-related topics

Networking as a topic is interesting and somewhat relevant to my web development interests but ultimately this class didn’t feel like it fed directly into my programming career or ambitions.

There’s very little programming in this class, and while I can imagine an interviewer or manager shrugging and saying, “Neat!” at the fact that I took a 10 week course in networking, I can’t imagine it’ll make or break my viability as a candidate for a programming job. (Just watch, now someone will ask me to label all the parts of a network-layer datagram header.)

Structurally, though, it’s a solid course – the workload was even, the grading was fair, and I walked away feeling like the class packed a lot of knowledge into my brain.

Class structure

  • 10 weeks
  • A weekly graded summary exercise of maybe 30 questions. You get two attempts, and they keep the higher score. There’s a 6 hour time limit but the most I ever spent was about 2.5 hours (and the fastest I ever got through one was about 45 minutes).
  • A lab every 2 weeks
  • 2 projects in which you program sockets using C or Java and Python
  • Midterm, final, both proctored and closed book but you get to take a one-sided note sheet in with you (size 4 font worked nicely)
  • There’s stuff due every week but it follows a consistent pattern

Time commitment

CS372 class was fairly time-consuming. Each week, I spent…

  • 2 to 4 hours on lectures and worksheets
  • 3 to 4 hours on the “weekly summaries” (6 hour graded quizzes), depending how many novel math problems were on them (this was worse in the first half of the quarter than it was in the latter half)
  • 3 hours on any given lab, if there was one that week
  • Anywhere from 6 to 10 hours on the current project, if there was one that week
  • 90 minutes on the quiz, if there was one that week
  • As many hours as I could afford studying for the midterm and the final in the 7 to 10 days leading up to the exam

Overall, I spent about 12 hours a week on this class. My children are in daycare 3 days a week to give me time to work on schoolwork, and I typically spent two of those days exclusively on this class’s material, plus some time in the evenings and the weekend if needed. The most time-intensive weeks were the ones that included a project. There were no “easy” weeks, and they don’t lighten the workload in anticipation of the midterm or final.

Compared to other classes, CS372 was a bit lighter than notoriously time-consuming classes such as CS162, CS261, and CS325. It was about on par with CS271 and CS361.

Lectures != worksheets != quizzes

Here’s my biggest gripe about this class, and the part where I try to help future students have a slightly easier time than I did.

The lectures lecture on one thing, the worksheets prompt you on another thing, and then the quizzes throw a bunch of math problems at you that weren’t really covered in the lectures or the worksheets. For many of them, you’re on your own to suss out the formula.

Worse, when you go Googling for help the top results are often for chegg.com, who will happily sell you the answers (eww) and old digital flashcards from previous students who posted answers but not how they actually solved the problems.

So, all that said, I thought I’d do something radical and document how to solve these problems for the benefit of anyone else taking this class.

How I solved…

Is it worth taking this class as an elective?

That’s the question everyone’s asking now as CS372 moves from being required coursework to an elective.

My short answer is no.

For me, there wasn’t enough practical problem-solving and programming in this course. The two socket programming projects are big and time-consuming, but they are dwarfed by the massive amounts of non-programming related work.

Some people may enjoy the theoretical nature of this class, but I prefer courses that teach skills and concepts I can immediately put to use on my software projects. I know there’s no “bad” knowledge, but I do feel like I spent 10 weeks studying something I will almost certainly never use.

OSU is rolling out a bunch of new electives in 2020 and beyond, and they all sound really exciting to me. (I’m graduating before I’ll have the chance to take them.)

Of the electives I have taken, I can easily recommend CS475 (Parallel Programming), and I will update this review with my opinion on CS492 (Mobile Dev) after I complete it next quarter (Winter 2020).

I really wanted to take CS493 (Cloud Application Development) but it requires CS372 as a pre-req and I’ll be graduating before Cloud runs again. Don’t be like me: many electives only run once or twice a year, so try to look ahead at least a full year so you can get into the electives you want. (I regret missing out on a chance to take Cloud.)

On the bright side, there’s no group work in CS372! So, if you’re sick of teammates who don’t produce anything and graded Canvas conversations, CS372 is a nice break from those sorts of things.

CS372’s Labs

This class alternates “labs” and “projects”. Labs are all about inspecting packets in a program called Wireshark, and projects are programming in a mix of C/Java and Python. (More on Projects in the next section).

There were 5 labs total and each one took about 3-4 hours apiece.

You can run the “trace” yourself, or you can use the downloaded trace from the author’s computer. I highly recommend using the downloaded trace. My own traces were polluted with tons of noise from my home network and I found that things were often “different” in one way or another. I wanted to just slice through labs like a hot knife through butter, and the easiest way to do what was using the provided trace data.

Each lab is 15-20 questions and you produce a pdf document that includes screenshots from Wireshark justifying your answer for each question. Overall, these were straightforward and manageable.

PS: I couldn’t get Wireshark to run on my Macbook so I had to use my Windows PC for the labs. Just a heads up for anyone else on a Mac. (And it’s well within the realm of possibility that the problem was unique to my machine or could have been solved with more effort.)

CS372’s Projects

There were two socket-programming projects in this class, and they were both challenging and time-consuming.

I felt like both of the projects were the most difficult part of the class. The rest of the class’s material is memorizing definitions and stepping through a series of steps to solve a math problem.

If you can, take CS344 first. The socket programming project in that class offers more hand-holding and provides some code you can adapt to CS372’s projects. (CS 372 students are directed to Beej’s Guide for help, but I didn’t find the guide useful at all. It’s long-winded, the examples are difficult to adapt to the project’s needs, and the attempts at humor are lame and eat up valuable screen real estate.)

I spent about 15 hours on Project 1 and about 30 hours on Project 2. Definitely start early on the projects and work in small, incremental steps. The times when I got mired were when I tried to do too much at once.

To the class’s credit, they provide a detailed rubric to test against. This was extremely helpful and something I wish all OSU CS classes would do.

Pro tip: The second project is meant to be a “portfolio piece”, meaning you can share your project code publicly once grading is over. Many students have done exactly this on GitHub. Part of being a software engineer is reading and understanding code you didn’t write, so there is value in looking up what others have done and stepping through it yourself until you comprehend it. My heartfelt thanks goes out to the past students who posted their Project 2 work publicly – I don’t think I could’ve gotten through the file transfer/sockets project without a few examples to study.

CS 372 Exams

Both the midterm and the final are proctored.

They are similar in structure to the weekly “summary exercises”, so taking the practice versions of those (look in the “Grades” section in Canvas and scroll all the way down for the ungraded practice versions) is time well spent. Expect a few novel problems that you’ve never seen before (those are definitely where I lost my points, some of the questions were unlike anything I’d studied).

My strategy (and I think this was a good one, as I walked away from this class with a solid A) was to score 100% or near it on every weekly summary, lab, project, etc. to make some room for mistakes on the tests.

Overall, I felt the tests were fair and that the materials provided were adequate preparation.

Final tips for CS 372

Get a good weekly routine going. The workload is extremely consistent (and rather heavy) so a consistent pattern will serve you well. Mine was something like…

  • Sunday and Monday were lectures and worksheets
  • Tuesday was the first attempt at the weekly summary and starting the lab or project assigned that week
  • Wednesday was all lab/project and the second attempt at the weekly summary
  • Friday was all lab and project
  • Saturday was anything that was left (I rarely needed Saturday, with the exception of Project 2, which totally dominated my life until it was over)

Get proficient (and fast) at solving the kinds of problems you encounter on the weekly summary exercises and you’ll be 80% of your way to a good grade on the exams.

Right before the midterm and the final, go back and practice the stuff you did a few weeks ago (preferably on a whiteboard or scratch paper like you’ll have in the exam). I was surprised at how rusty I got at problems I was solving with ease just a few weeks ago. You really want to be a well-oiled machine at solving the math problems come exam time.

Some whiteboard practice a few days before the final exam. I found it helpful to solve the same kind of problems over and over on the whiteboard so it was just muscle memory come test time.

Don’t be afraid to go straight to teh Googlez for help. The projects in this class basically leave you on your own, and the fastest and best way (imo) is to start Googling. You’ll do that at work someday, anyway.

Onwards to Winter 2020! I’ll be taking CS 492 Mobile next quarter, followed by Capstone in the spring.

OSU eCampus CS475 Parallel Programming review & recap

This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.

Six-word summary: A well-designed and satisfying course

I feel like I sometimes write these recap articles to complain and warn other students of landmines, but CS475 was what every OSU online CS course should be: organized, succinct, and educational. I learned so much and enjoyed the course from start to finish.

CS475 Review

It only runs in the Spring quarters, but it’s worth holding out for! You’ll learn a lot, the material is interesting, the course is well-paced, and the exams felt fair.

I picked this class because parallel programming was something I thought sounded intimidating and was unlikely to be something I would attempt on my own. I’m very glad I chose it! It was way less intimidating than I feared, and now I feel entry-level competent in a subject I formerly knew nothing about.

Class structure

  • 10 weeks
  • 8 programming assignments where you code, run the code, and then write an analysis of it
  • I spent about 7-10 hours on this class each week, making it one of the lighter workloads in the program
  • Proctored midterm, proctored final
  • Weekly quizzes in Canvas (usually 5 questions with a full hour to answer them)
  • About 1-1.5 hours of video lectures each week (sadly they are without captions, but they are very high quality otherwise)
  • Some code is provided for you to use, saving time for focusing on what the class is really about
  • Instructor attends office hours! He’s really approachable, you should go even if you don’t have a specific question!

The instructor is SUPER active! You can get on a video chat with him – he’s just sitting there at pre-announced times, waiting for people to show up to his video chat room! He’ll look at your code! He’ll talk to you 1:1 about topics! I’ve never had such a productive “office hours” experience as I did in this class, and I didn’t even show up with any questions.

Contrast this with how most classes in this program hand you a problem and set you loose on figuring it yourself (via Google, Stack Overflow, old projects posted to GitHub, etc). There’s a time and a place for that, sure, but for $2000 in tuition I’m happiest when the class makes me feel like I learned something from the person teaching it. I want an experience I can’t get from Google and an independent project. I want an intelligent, skilled person to say “here’s what I know, and here’s how I think about it” and that’s how Professor Bailey ran this class.

Prof. Bailey also sends out an anonymous survey at the end of the course asking for feedback on each and every assignment as well as time spent. He genuinely cares about the class.

CS475 Project Structure

Unlike most classes, CS475 hands you some “starter code” for every assignment. You still have to put it in the right place, call it at the right time with the right data, and format and analyze the output yourself, but being provided this “starter code” was great for a few reasons:

  • Less time spent on things that aren’t the point of the assignment
  • No super fancy math skills needed (the bezier volume calculation formula is given to you, for example)
  • Less likely that you’ll go off into the weeds and do something ridiculously wrong and miss the point of the assignment
  • Less time needed overall for each assignment

This class has you throw nearly 100% of your efforts towards parallel programming related coding and analysis. For those of us with a finite number of hours in a week it was so good to just focus on the subject of the class and skip some of the boilerplate project setup. This class would pair well with another less-time consuming class, if you need (or prefer) to double up.

Most of this class’s projects go something like this: start a new C project, bring in the starter code, refactor/add to it to make it do what you need, write a bash script (or whatever you prefer) to run a loop and pass different parameters to the program each run, get all of the output in your Terminal (some people write it to a file), dump the output into a spreadsheet (I used Google Sheets), create graphs and write your analysis (in response to prompts).

Typical project output – here’s my output from Project 2

Bring these into your favorite spreadsheet software and create a pivot table. Then, generate the needed graphs for your analysis.

Somehow I made it this far in life without ever needing a pivot table. In this class, pivot tables made graphs a cinch.

And that’s pretty much how the assignments go.

I was a bit intimidated by this class before I took it. People say it’s dry and the subject has a reputation for being challenging, so I wanted to show other prospective students what’s actually involved and how approachable it really is.

Tips for CS475

NVIDIA CUDA support is limited on some versions of Mac computers. (For example, Apple just doesn’t support it for OS 10.14 at the time of this writing). If you’re on a Mac, I suggest using the school-provided rabbit server for your CUDA assignments and not wasting hours like I did trying to get it all working on a Mac.

Go to the office hours! Seriously, I went on a whim near the end of the quarter and was surprised to find myself alone in a video chat with the professor. I was just going to lurk but it ended up being a great chance to discuss a bunch of class topics one on one. Another student showed up and he stepped through her previous assignment code with her. You can’t beat the value of having an expert review your code with you!

The exams are straightforward. Some classes in this program use exams as an opportunity to test your speediness and your ability to keep track of registers through multiple iterations of multiple loops, but this class kept it fair and simple: watch the lectures, take notes, study those notes and you’ll do fine! He even gives a generous amount of time for the exams.

Overall, it’s just a high quality course. The lectures were freshly recorded, well-paced, on-topic, and relevant to the assignments and tests. The weekly assignments always looked challenging at first but were ultimately quite doable and enjoyable.

I’ve got just 4 classes left to complete my degree. I’ll be back in the fall quarter for Intro to Networks! See you all then!

OSU eCampus CS344 Operating Systems review & recap

This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.

Six-word summary: Four final projects in a row

CS344 is your chance to work on four large, back-to-back projects that cover a breadth of topics. They feel a bit contrived (ie: more like schoolwork than real-world problems) at times and their application to real problems might be hard to see at first, but there’s no denying it: doing four big projects in a row will level up your skills a whole bunch.

CS344 Review

This course picks up where other C courses left off and introduces some new and exciting features, such as bash scripting and mutual exclusion locks.

The projects are utterly massive – any one of them could’ve been CS162’s notoriously huge final project – and the course comes off as feeling more like an advanced C course than an operating systems course because of it. You do a lot of project setup and boilerplate in this class (but you do touch on a long list of OS topics as well). Sometimes the new thing (whatever the actual point of the assignment was) only takes minutes to add, like a little cherry on top of a 5-tier wedding cake of a C project.

Class structure

  • 10 weeks
  • 4 programming projects with about 2 weeks each
  • Bash and C programming language
  • No midterm, open-book (but timed) final
  • Due dates are kinda all over the place, best to triple-check them (they don’t follow a pattern)

Grading script FTW

CS344’s best feature is the clarity of its expectations. Unlike many of the courses that came before it in this program, this one is VERY CLEAR about what’s expected and how you’ll be graded on it. They hand you a grading script that runs your program code and spits out a list of results (pass/fail) or something for you to interpret. When it all passes, so do you. It’s that simple.

Overall, this class is fair and straightforward. It’s one of those classes you just gotta be disciplined and hardworking in, and it’ll reward you by introducing you (in a fairly friendly way) to topics such as sockets, locking threads, writing bash script, making your own shell, and more. I’m not sure I would have pushed myself through some of this stuff on my own – the project where we wrote our own shell was definitely intimidating at first – but I’m glad the program included this class and these opportunities. I think I learned a lot in CS344!

Tips for CS344

You don’t have to code on the school server. The class will tell you up and down and over and over to code in VIM on the school server. You don’t have to. I did the whole class on my MacBook in SublimeText and I transferred the files to the school server for testing using FileZilla. It’s just bash and C code, there’s no reason to isolate it the way the class tells you to.

I think this whole “only work on the school server” stuff is bad advice. The programs in this class are large enough to justify a text editor and working locally makes it easy to use version control (which you should absolutely be using – at least one person in my class lost their work by compiling over their .c files on accident :( ).

I kinda wish I’d taken it alone or with a less time-consuming class. I paired it with CS340 (Databases) and the two classes just took turns being hellishly time-consuming. It’s like right on the fence of being a “better off alone” class. By itself it might’ve felt light, but paired with anything I was constantly strapped for time. YMMV.

OSU eCampus CS340 Intro to Databases review & recap

This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.

Six-word summary: Surprise, it’s a web development class!

You’ll glance at some database topics in CS340, but you’ll put most of your effort into building a big full-stack website.

CS340 Review

Get ready to sharpen your web skills! You’ll work with a partner the entire quarter (try to pick a good one!) to design and implement a website that interfaces with a database. This class is very heavy on web development. You’ll make tables to display data that comes in from the db, forms that can create, update, and delete data, and you’ll need it all up and running on the school’s servers by end of quarter. Course pacing is uneven and the numbering of assignments, projects steps, and assignments is borderline illogical.

I HIGHLY recommend finishing 290 before you take 340 so that you can use your last 290 project as starter code for 340’s. It’s criminal that people say you should take 290 and 340 simultaneously. Don’t do it. One of the last projects of 290 is a node.js website that interfaces with a database, and if you have this project complete, you have a fantastic head start on 340’s website project.

Class structure

  • 10 weeks
  • No midterm, no final
  • Pick your partner in the first week
  • Each week you make progress towards a completed website project with your partner
  • Some weeks require “peer review” in which people from outside your group look at what you turned in and critique it (and you, in turn, review others’ work)
  • Hits hard in the last few weeks of the quarter when you have to put the entire site together. Start early.

The first week is slow: you’ll pick a partner and you’ll import a database dump into the database tool of your choosing. You’ll sit on your hands after this ~30 minutes of work is complete.

This is a good time to figure out what you want your site to be. My partner and I did a museum ticketing system and found it easy to hit all the requirements. Don’t reinvent the wheel here.

Each week you’ll work on an ever-growing document outlining your plans. No one will read it, but you’ll submit it every week nonetheless. There is absolutely no TA feedback at any point in this class. I finished this class without so much as a “Looks good!” from a TA.

About midway through the quarter they’ll give you an assignment to build the HTML portion of your site. If this is all you do this week you’ll probably fall behind, because each week after this has a much higher workload. You should immediately look at your projects from 290 to get started with the routing and db queries once you’re happy with the HTML.

There are no exams and no quizzes.

CS340: Too light on database-specific stuff

For a database class, this class is (sadly) rather light on hands-on query writing. It tries to teach database design, which is appreciated, but I think it spends too long belaboring minutia relating to the design diagrams (we must’ve done three iterations of ours before the precise requirements finally became clear on Piazza). It also spends weeks on the diagrams – one would’ve been enough.

The two places CS340 has you get your hands dirty is on Mimir for a few query-writing assignments and in your quarter-long website project. This is where the class shines: where it’s actually teaching (or forcing you to figure out on your own) how to interact with a database to do something useful.

CS340’s Mimir assignments

Rather than write SQL queries in any kind of industry-standard tool, CS340’s query writing is done in a browser-based tool called Mimir. Deadlines are generous and the work takes maybe 2-5 hours to get through (per assignment). Mimir is slow and the feedback it gives is not as robust as what you might get in a better tool. CS340 does give you the db dump, so you can go play around in a better environment (I used MySQL Workbench) but sometimes syntax that works locally does not work in Mimir.

Nonetheless, the Mimir-based parts of the course are some of the best parts. Experience writing queries is a skill you can take to an interview and job. I just wish there had been more of it.

CS340 group work

“What one engineer can do in one week, two engineers can do in two weeks.” The adage holds up in CS340. My partner was great, but I think I would’ve moved faster through the project without having to coordinate with someone else. There’s a lot of overhead in keeping someone else in the loop, not duplicating work, waiting for input before continuing, etc.

A few weeks into the quarter, everyone gets assigned a random group of 5. This is your “peer review” group. (Your partner will be in his/her own peer review group). Since 340 doesn’t seem to feature any TA feedback, this is what the class gives you instead: feedback from other students who probably know the same or less than you do about what you’re working on.

The real kicker? You have to bring their feedback into your document and either act on it or explain why you chose not to. The feedback we got was generally useless: at best it was people pointing out UI bugs we already knew about, at worst it was a hot take dashed out 2 minutes before the feedback was due that suggested little to no reading comprehension on the reviewer’s part. At least we didn’t have to all meet at the same time like we did in 361.

Our CS340 project

We made a museum ticketing system. This project was a bit large for the time given but I enjoyed working on it.

In our app, you can add museums, add exhibits to museums, “sell” tickets to guests with a variety of exhibit entitlements, create new guests, add orders to existing guests, search for tickets by ID, date or transaction, view transactions, refund exhibit entitlements from tickets, and refund tickets themselves. You can also rename exhibits and museums, and update guest info.

We used Bootstrap on a node.js/Express/MySQL stack. (I’d have preferred to use an actual front-end framework but my partner was much newer to all this so we went with a nice big bowl of JQuery spaghetti instead.)

Here’s a few screenshots from our completed web app:

Our app’s default page – you can change which museum to view tickets and exhibits for.
Here’s the “sell tickets” flow, where the user chooses which guest types to create tickets for as well as a visit date.
The user can manage which extra exhibits each guest ticket should have access to.
Review your order before proceeding…
Enter guest info and complete the purchase! The ticket info is added to the database.
The Transactions page shows all pages and provides links to individual tickets.
In the Museums page the user views all museums and can choose to rename them.

Here’s one of the queries from the project that I wrote: 

app.get('/get-transactions', function(request, response) {
     var context = {};
     var queryStr = "SELECT tr.transaction_id, tr.trans_date, tr.trans_time, g.fname, g.lname, tr.pymt_type, GROUP_CONCAT(ti.ticket_id) AS ticket_ids, GROUP_CONCAT(ti.admission_type) AS guest_types "+
       "FROM transactions tr "+
       "JOIN guests g ON tr.guest_id = g.guest_id "+
       "JOIN tickets ti ON tr.transaction_id = ti.transaction_id "+
       "WHERE tr.museum_id = ? "+
       "GROUP BY tr.transaction_id;";
     pool.query(queryStr, [request.query.id], function(err, result, fields) {
         if (err) {
             console.log(err);
             return;
         }

     context.transactions = result;
     response.json(context);
  });
});

GROUP_CONCAT is a neat trick we used to get a string of ticket IDs and admissions types back from the db (which you can then parse on the front-end).

My favorite parts of this class were when I got to do something new and exciting in SQL.

CS340: What’s missing?

I wish the class had covered any (or all) of these topics:

  • Non-relational databases
  • Input sanitization
  • Security
  • Stored procedures
  • Thread locks
  • Transactions
  • Advanced SQL (this class never goes further than a SELECT within a SELECT)
  • Best practices

And this is just “what I know I don’t know”.

If I were to redesign this course, I would give students a defined project (“Make a theme park ride ticketing system”) and provide a functioning front-end so the class can super deep dive into database-specific topics instead. I know databases don’t exist in isolation, but the sheer amount of front-end work it required to interact meaningfully with our data greatly overshadowed the database work.

A few final tips for CS340

The course is disorganized and the assignments never fall into a predictable “rhythm”, so double-check everything. Every week it’s something different: this week you turn in a PDF, the next week a .zip. Sometimes you turn it into Canvas, sometimes you post it to your “peer review” discussion group. Does it count for you and your partner or just you? It varies week to week. Is there a quiz that opened last week due this week? These aren’t difficult things to figure out, but they add a lot of “overhead” and I saw more than a few people going “OMG I thought that submission counted for both of us!!” in the Slack chat.

Take 290 first. Easily the best thing you can do for yourself to ensure success in CS340. The last 290 assignment will have you make routes for interacting with a database. You can use that work as boilerplate for your CS340 project and save yourself a ton of grief. Can you imagine taking 290 and 340 at the same time and being stuck on the same problem for both classes? Take 290 first! It should be a hard pre-req for 340.

Skip the lectures. They’re a mess. I mean, I won’t tell you how to live your life, but the lectures in this class are worthless. They won’t help you build your site, they’re thin on examples, and sometimes the topic they introduce was actually needed for the homework due last week so… yeah. I’m a diehard “watch the lectures no matter what” person and I gave up on them. It’s like they’re from a previous version of the course or something.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use Bootstrap (or similar) to make your front-end look nice, choose a project idea that lends itself to lots of pairings (customers to orders, people to tickets, etc).

Overall, I was disappointed by CS340. I’ve weathered other not-so-great courses and found the good in them, but this one was just a whole lotta making a bigger website than we made in 290 and writing a few SQL queries on the side. My database/SQL skills didn’t grow much in this course and I’m bummed that it didn’t live up to my expectations. My partner was awesome, though, so there was that. :)

OSU eCampus CS271 Computer Architecture and Assembly Language review & recap

This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.

Six-word summary: Where my 4.0 GPA went to die

CS271 is a pedantic deep-dive into your computer’s inner workings and an opportunity to enjoy coding in a highly restrictive language. There’s special emphasis on going step-by-step through the stack frame and understanding what’s in every register and even some much-appreciated training on “what order to do things in” when building a program.

CS271 Review

CS271 often felt like it was made of two distinct halves that ran in parallel: the first half is made up of the cute little MASM programs you write for the homework that’s due every other week. The other half is the mountains of computer architecture trivia and methods for calculating various things you learn for the bi-weekly exams, such as binary/hex conversions, Hamming codes, memory usage, optimization, recursive output, stack frame changes, the step-by-step changes in registers as a program runs or steps through a loop, and so on.

The class is very well organized. They tell you precisely what to do for the homework and what the output should look like, line by line. Unlike many classes in OSU’s CS program thus far, you won’t need to do a ton of Googling to learn the material – the lectures and the book reading are actually adequate preparation for most of the class’s homework and quiz questions. The workload is consistent. Each week follows the same pattern, and the homework’s complexity ramps up slowly.

However, the homework (in which you write some Assembly language code) is rather light and may give you a false sense of security come quiz and exam time. The true heavy hitters in this class are the self-checks you do after the lectures, the weekly exercises, and the bi-weekly quizzes. Mastering the material found in all of these is essential for surviving the midterm and the final.

Whether 271’s material is interesting is going to depend on your own likes and dislikes. I thought most of it was squarely in the “hey, that’s neat” category, but I thought it focused too much over low-level details that (probably) won’t directly enhance my career in software. (And that’s just like, my opinion, man – I’m sure some people who take 271 find their calling and never resurface from the depths of CPU architecture, binary math, hex addresses, and bit ordering.)

Class structure

  • 10 weeks
  • Multiple briskly-paced weekly lectures
  • An ungraded/untimed “self-check” exercise worksheet for every single lecture – you should actually do these, the quizzes and exams pull from them
  • A weekly exercise quiz with a 6 hour time limit – you get two attempts and they keep the best score, but each attempt has a different batch of questions so it is advised to take it twice to see both question banks
  • 4 bi-weekly tests, 1-hour time limit, each worth 2.5% of your final grade
  • 6 Assembly-language coding projects (homework assignments) total – each one gives you two full weeks to work on it, with the grading rubric released at the start of the 2nd week
  • Proctored midterm, proctored final
  • Steady, even workload
  • Less self-teaching than some OSU classes (still quite a bit of rote memorization and practice, though)
  • NO GROUP PROJECTS!

Tips for CS271

This was my first OSU CS class where I couldn’t quite earn a solid A (I got an A-). It certainly wasn’t for lack of effort or time put in – I think I cleared 20 hours of practice most weeks and I worked on this class’s stuff daily.

There’s a ton of material and the tests are very picky – they’re not multiple choice where half the answers are obviously silly, they’re fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice where all the options seem like they could be right. (The tests are also almost half your final grade. Ouch.)

When I look back on what I could’ve done better and what I would advise future students, these are the things that come to mind.

CS271 tip #1: Get the book, it doesn’t suck!

This is one of the books that’s worth buying. It’s approachable with many  examples to follow and, surprisingly, many quiz questions are lifted line-for-line from the book.

See Assembly Language for x86 Processors on Amazon.com

I liked having a physical book because it freed up screen space during quizzes and while working on homework. I found it helpful to read on paper, practice in a notebook, and really work problems over and over until I had the process down cold. (That’s just my personal preference; I seem to retain more if I read and work on paper.)

CS271 tip #2: Make yourself some worksheets and grade yourself

Speaking of rote memorization and brute-force practice, I highly recommend making yourself some worksheets out of the weekly self-checks and bi-weekly quizzes. Print them out and work through them (over and over) until you can do all of them quickly and perfectly.

This technique was time-consuming but it went a long way to cementing the steps to solving all the various types of CS271 problems. As I mentioned earlier, the homework is borderline useless for the exams. The exams draw their questions almost entirely from the weekly self-checks and bi-weekly quizzes.

The exams tend to layer multiple concepts together into one question and they’re autograded, not graded by a potentially generous TA, so your goal for CS271’s tests should be to become very fast at solving every kind of problem you encounter in the practice materials.

CS271 tip #3: Get a binary/hex calculator

The Casio fx-115ES can do math in binary and hex: addition, subtraction, and conversions between binary/hex and back again.

I had no idea this kind of calculator even existed and the course materials make no mention of it. Frustratingly, I only found out about it through the class’s Slack chat. I was doing conversions by hand like a total chump, which would have cost me dearly on the midterm either in terms of time spent or stupid mistakes or both. The hex and binary questions on the exam were made trivial by having this calculator. I don’t know why the syllabus doesn’t open with “GET THIS CALCULATOR”.

As an alternative to the physical calculator, the course lets you use your operating system’s built-in calculator. (I did this course’s work on my PC but I take tests via ProctorU on Macbook since that’s where my webcam is, so I preferred the physical calculator over having to get familiar with multiple OS calculators.)

CS271 tip #4: Pack that cheat sheet to the density of a neutron star

I made mine in Google Docs, which will let you pick a font size as small as 6 (you have to type it in, it’s not in the dropdown).

One side of my CS271 cheat sheet – the back side was all code examples.

I don’t care for exam cheat sheets. I think allowing cheat sheets drives students to put their efforts into guessing what details should be on the sheet, which sets the student up for an inevitable wave of frustration and disappointment when they realize 2 seconds into the exam that they guessed wrong. Letting students bring a cheat sheet seems to inspire instructors feel free to ask all kinds of minutia-focused questions instead of testing for a more general understanding of the concepts.

But… nobody asked my opinion, and I doubt the cheat sheets are going away any time soon, so my advice here is to pack your sheet as full as you can get it. I think a good cheat sheet for CS271’s midterm and final would be at least 50% code examples, which is what the back side of my sheet was full of.

CS271 tip #5: The extra credit on the homework was generally a waste of time for me

I tried to do the extra credit (of which there are 1-3 points up for grabs on every bi-weekly assignment), but for the most part I found the extra credit opportunities frustrating and almost as time-consuming as the rest of the assignment itself. Your mileage may vary, but I should’ve spent the time on worksheet drills instead.

CS271 tip #6: If I could do one thing differently…

I’d spend more time studying all the nuances of what happens in the system stack while a program runs a loop. Here’s me practicing on a whiteboard, but despite all this preparation I still think this is where I lost points on the exam. I was probably off by 4 on some memory address or miscounted loops somewhere.

And that’s it for CS271! I’m glad I’m done with it; I’ve heard it’s one of the tougher courses and for me, that was definitely true. I worked very hard in this class and I advise all future students to do the same. The tests are no joke and your ability to track and manage tiny details will be tested like never before.

Next up: CS290 – Web Development. See you all next quarter!

OSU eCampus CS261 Data Structures review & recap

This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.

Six-word summary: Loads of implementations, light on context.

Heaps, AVL trees, hash tables, and a whole bunch of ways to sort data – you’ll do it all in CS261, but you might finish the course wondering why.

CS261 Review

This class is all about data structures. Some colleges combine data structures and algorithms into one semester-long class, so I’m happy that Data Structures got its own dedicated 10 weeks in OSU’s program.

Some of your new friends in CS261

Class structure

  • 10 weeks
  • 6 assignments total, evenly distributed through the quarter
  • Proctored midterm, proctored final
  • Nice slow-down in assignments and workload as midterm and final approach, giving sufficient time to study
  • Weekly group obligation: 2-5 worksheets to submit as a group (however you divvy it up is up to you) and typed weekly meeting minutes
  • Steady, even workload

The first 4 weeks will revisit topics from CS162, so if you wanted more practice reversing a linked list or resizing an array, you’ll get to do those things again in CS261.

After the midterm, the class spends 1 week on each topic: AVL trees (including tree sort), min heaps (including heap sort), hash tables (open addressing and chaining), and graphs (including Dijkstra’s). Big-O complexity is also covered in the context of the aforementioned subjects.

The video lectures are decent but to truly understand these topics I recommend searching the Interwebs for additional resources. These are big topics and there are many excellent explanations, diagrams, walkthroughs, etc. available on YouTube. (This is just one of them.)

The workload is consistent and gets lighter before the midterm and final, which left plenty of time to dedicate to studying for the exams.

CS261 books: the one they tell you to get, and the one you SHOULD get

I love a good book. The books we used for CS161, CS162, and CS225 were excellent. I did not love the lack of a book in CS261.

Instead of a book, CS261 provides pdfs to read every week. They are dry, boring, and do not display well on a mobile device. There are also worksheets that open with several paragraphs of reading. These are also dry, boring, and do not display well on a mobile device.

For some reason, this is the recommended (but optional) book for CS261: C Programming Language. It’s an okay book, but it’s almost completely beside the point of the class. It’s a reference to the C language. I don’t know why they recommend it – none of the class material relates back to it. If you’ve taken CS161/CS162/CS165, you know enough C++ to hobble along in C until you get your footing. If you run into any trouble (and you probably won’t past the second week or so) you’ll Google your error message, figure it out, and be on your way.

Then, at the end of fall quarter, I joined the CS325 Slack channel in preparation for my Winter 2018 quarter. There, I saw someone recommending the book Grokking Algorithms to incoming CS325 students.

THIS is the book you should buy for CS261.

I ordered it to get a jump start on CS325, but when I opened it my heart sank a bit: where the F*** was this book when I was still in CS261?! 

Every section of this book is concise and clear, with simple explanations and memorable illustrations. Most topics get multiple explanations and diagrams. The book covers so many topics and I’m just kicking myself for not having this book while I was still in CS261.

Grokking Algorithms has everything from visualizing Big-O runtimes…

to performing a search on a graph…

to adding neighbors as you traverse nodes on a graph…

to sorts, complete with graphs, Big-O complexities, and pseudocode…

to understanding how the stack can be used to perform a set of instructions recursively.

This is just a small sampling of what’s in this amazing book.

I wish someone had told me about this book before I waded through CS261’s long, tedious PDFs on these subjects (which often felt like they were written for people who already understood the topic).

Do yourself a favor. If you are about to take CS261, get this book and refer to it often. It is way better than the materials they provide you in the class.

CS261 uses C, not C++

I’m pointing this out because I see a lot of questions (and complaints) about the switch to C from C++ in CS261. It’s true: unlike CS161 and CS162, CS261 assignments use the C language. HOWEVER – it’s really not a big deal. Any panicky feelings you may have over this at the start of the course will soon pass.

Instead of this:

for (int i = 0; ...)

you’ll do this:

int i;
for (i = 0; ... )

And you’ll write comments like this:

/* comment goodies here */

Little things. Nothing you can’t solve with a quick Google query and by the 2nd or 3rd week you’ll probably forget you even went through this.

They ask you to use an IDE… but you don’t need to

This surprised me: CS261’s first week includes an assignment in which you bring your code into an IDE and then submit a screenshot to show you did it.

As far as I could tell, there’s no reason to keep using the IDE past week 1. You don’t have to choose a particular IDE (or an IDE at all) for the sake of CS261. The class doesn’t teach you how to use the features that make an IDE worth using, like using the IDE’s debugger to step through code.

I tried CodeBlocks for a week, but it crashed so often it was a serious roadblock to productivity until I dumped it and went back to Sublime Text. (I’m on a Mac and the last release of CodeBlocks is from 2013 – maybe that was part of the problem.) 

An IDE is just a tool, and I feel like which IDE you choose is a personal choice and none of the school’s business unless the class is going to teach specific features of that IDE or provide workflow tools that only work with the IDE, which CS261 does not. There’s no reason you should have to abandon whatever tools you’re already comfortable with. This was a strange requirement, in my opinion.

CS261 assignments

The 6 assignments are like “coding madlibs” – they provide you with a collection of files and you fill in the functions that are missing code. The assignments offer little opportunity for creativity, which probably makes grading them easier but also made them more forgettable.

The real shortcoming with the assignments was the missed opportunity to tie the data structures and sorts to real world applications. The greater context of why you might choose a particular data structure or how to analyze a problem and then decide what data structure or sorting algorithm to use is, sadly, largely absent in this class’s materials.

I felt like the “fill in the blank” nature of the assignments didn’t help my brain make links between Real Life Problems and All That Code I Wrote in a Vacuum for CS261.

Here’s a ton of code I wrote. What’s it for? Getting a good grade in CS261, of course.

This “missing context” was further illustrated to me when I told a friend about the class I was taking, and he posed a question:

"Suppose you have a million images. Filenames/filesize/etc. don't matter, just the content of the image. I give you a new image and you have to tell me if you already have this image in your set. How do you figure it out? What data structures do you use?" 

                                                   - my smart friend

CS261 isn’t going to prepare you for this kind of question.

The solution – and surely there’s more than one – to my friend’s question was basically to hash all the image blobs into a hash table, then hash the new image to figure out where it would go and compare it to what’s in the table. You don’t hash on filename or filesize or anything like that, because with image hashing, you want to go by the content of the pictures themselves.

I include this example not to point out what a dunce I am – I already know that – but to illustrate a missed opportunity in CS261 to tie the course material to real life applications. Here’s some more reading on the image hashing question, if you’re curious.

CS261 group work

The weekly group work is going to be either great or a chore depending on who you get grouped with.

In the first week of the quarter everyone was assigned to a group of 5, with the sorting criteria being our time zones and general availability as noted in a spreadsheet that the instructor shared the week before class started (hope you were checking your email!).

For 10 weeks, my group was responsible for submitting 2-5 completed “worksheets” each week by end of day Sunday and a typed log of our discussion, called “meeting minutes” (basically who said what). I use the term “worksheet” loosely, some of them were solidly in “assignment” territory.

In a perfect world, your group will engage in vigorous, insightful discussion on each worksheet, leading to new insights and reinforced learning. (Some of my classmates assured me this is what they were getting out of their CS261 group experience.)

In the actual world, your group will probably struggle to find a meeting time that works for everyone and cope with weekly absences from the group meeting. Our “discussions” were rather thin – we either agreed the worksheet was easy or hard, and then kind of struggled to find anything else to talk about.

I don’t blame my groupmates, I think the worksheets just didn’t lend themselves well to discussion. There wasn’t anything controversial or debatable about the worksheet problems, just cut and dry “fill in the blank” code.

CS261 exams

The midterm and final exams for CS261 proctored, so you’ll have to go to a nearby test center or get set up with an online proctor. Both exams are 1 hour, 50 minutes long.

The midterm is coding heavy – expect to write methods in Word docs, save out a pdf for each problem, and attach them to the test. Many questions require you to download an image or attachment from the test, open it, and answer the question in the test’s text box. This was a clunky workflow and I was constantly afraid I would accidentally navigate away from the test. The final exam, however, only required one external doc to be produced and attached, and only a couple questions required opening an attachment. (Phew.)

As for what to study: study trivia. There’s a ton of trivia sprinkled throughout this course. You’ll want to memorize the runtime complexity of every sort, when to use what data structure (according to the class materials), properties of each data structure, and so on. A lot of that trivia will show up on the test. I found it helpful to make notecards of little tidbits of info that are sprinkled throughout the lectures and reading materials – they helped, but I was still caught off-guard by some of the questions.

My CS261 flash cards and worksheet organizer were invaluable.

A few final tips for CS261

Do all the worksheets yourself, even if your group comes up with some kind of “worksheet rotation”. By the time this class was done I think I’d done every worksheet at least 2 or 3 times, because they’re good practice for the tests.

Use a visualization tool. This is the one I used – it’s not perfect (I wish it showed individual steps for things like AVL rotations) but it’ll help you check your work.

Print all the worksheets. I didn’t have a printer going into this class but I quickly saw the need for one. Most worksheets provide you with function signatures and helper methods, and your job is to “fill in the blank”. Therefore, I felt it was better to have the worksheet printed in front of me so I could fill in the blanks, rather than working in an editor (or worse, a word processing doc), separated from the rest of the worksheet.

Some of my CS261 final exam prep: I redid the weekly worksheets until I had them down cold, and I printed the questions from the practice final.

Practice on paper, and get fast. The tests are, collectively, over half your grade in this class, so your performance on the exams really matters. I felt pressed for time on both exams, finishing within 5 minutes of the time limit both times. I’ve never really been one to study for tests, figuring I should’ve learned the material during the class itself, but I had to buckle down and get serious about studying for CS261. I made flash cards, practice tests, and put probably 20 hours into studying for the midterm and over 50 into studying for the final.

Knowing the code (implementations) is important, but the final exam (which is 30% of the final grade) focuses more on knowing the step-by-step behavior of altering a particular data structure. Be sure you know how to draw specific kinds of trees and how they change when a node is removed.

Join the Slack channel! Lots of my classmates could be found there every week discussing the homework and answering each others’ questions.

Get the Grokking Algorithms book. Seriously, and while you’re at it, invent a time machine and tell me about this book before I take CS261.

And… that’s it for this quarter! I’ll be in CS325 Analysis of Algorithms next quarter (Winter 2018), so be sure to say hi if you see me (Mandi) on Piazza or Slack!

Reports from other students in the program

Are you also blogging about your journey through OSU’s eCampus CS program? Leave me a comment and I’ll add a link here!

OSU eCampus CS162 Intro to Computer Science II review & recap

This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.

Six-word summary: Brutally paced pointers pointers pointers pointers

The beatings are over I survived CS162! If you were wondering where OSU’s eCampus computer science weeder course is, this is it.

The material is challenging and the workload is punishing. The video lectures are crap, but the book is good. The class isn’t well organized (expect poorly written assignments with unclear requirements). 10 weeks is nowhere near enough.

However: I learned a lot. I got faster than I ever thought possible and worked with topics I thought would have had their own standalone courses.

In this article: topics covered in CS162, survival guide, what I thought of the class.

Note: While I normally love to post code here, I can’t share any of my project code (against student code of conduct) or specific assignment requirements, test questions, etc.

Topics covered in CS162

The class is taught in C++ and teaches (or at least requires you to know):

  • pointers to arrays
  • pointers in arrays
  • pointers to pointers
  • pointers to instances of classes
  • passing pointers to functions
  • linked lists made of pointers
  • abstract class and subclasses
  • virtual functions
  • overloading operators (give == an exciting new meaning!)
  • polymorphism
  • writing functions that do something recursively, like reverse a string, sum numbers in an array, solve a math problem
  • data structures: queue, dequeue, stack, linked lists, circularly linked lists
  • sorting algorithms

    Equipment

CS162 is a programming class. Like CS161, I found my Macbook to be sufficient for this class.

I don’t know why they tell people to get a Windows PC and use Visual Studio. I didn’t need it and you won’t need it – there is no assignment based on Visual Studio knowledge.

In fact, judging just by Piazza posts, a number of students seemed confused by the extra files and the “another thing to learn” factor introduced by Visual Studio.

In case you are curious: I did every assignment in Sublime Text and a Terminal window.

Workload

At any given time expect to be working on a 1-week lab assignment and a 2-week project, and mid-course, a group project on top of the first two. You will also write a multi-page document (PDF) for each project with a test plan (input, expected outcome chart), your designs, ideas you changed along the way, reflections on the assignment. This document always took me at least 3-5 hours to complete to my standards. There’s a quiz every couple weeks (15 minutes, not proctored).

I’m a proactive student who started each week’s material the moment it was released, worked on it daily, and generally finished just moments before a new load of work was dumped onto me.

The first two weeks hit like a ton of bricks: a simple Langton’s Ant simulation by itself would have been a large assignment, but CS162 adds a user-navigable menu, input validation, user-adjustable parameters (dynamically sized board, variable turns to run, etc.), and other features that have to be designed, coded, tested, debugged.

Oh, yeah – it has a visual component, too.

There are also two lab assignments to complete while you work on the Langton’s Ant project.

This pattern continues until the end of the course. The toughest week was the one where I was working on a project, a lab, and a group assignment all at the same time.

CS162 Survival Tactics

It’s easy to find people complaining online about how disorganized and intense this class is but what I really wanted when I was in the thick of it was some help. (The OSU eCampus CS subreddit is a good place to look for advice on CS162, too.)

Here’s what I did (or wish I’d done sooner) that made CS162 more bearable.

Take it by itself (if you can)

I know there are financial aid reasons not to but if you’re normally taking 2 classes a quarter, consider taking CS162 alone (or at least with fewer classes than you normally would). It’s a ton of complex material – assuming you haven’t worked a lot with C++ pointers, memory, arrays, etc. yet – and the assignments are black holes for time.

Diagram things out on paper

I found many of CS162’s assignments too complex to hold entirely in my brain.

For example, here’s a crazy thing we did: create a circularly linked list (in C++), let the user fill it and delete nodes from it. When you exit the program, it has to unload from memory node by node. “Empty nodes” are marked with -1 for their values. This drawing I made helped a ton (actually, this was probably the 5th iteration of this drawing).

And here’s another one, this one showing how the heroes in the polymorphism project either rejoin the tournament queue or get kicked out to each player’s respective loser pile.

PS: Some people got really precious about their diagrams having to be works of art, but you don’t have to for these assignments. Just draw this stuff out, paper/pencil (or a little whiteboard) is sufficient, and plan to trash your first few drawings. If you need some material to bulk out your retrospective writing assignments for each project, photos of the diagrams you make are excellent fodder.

Go straight to Google (and Stack Overflow, and YouTube)

Sure, it sucks to pay $1880 to do so much self-teaching but you’ll get a lot of mileage out of the skill. The recorded lectures are crappy and I felt like they were wasting my time. There are better guides to all of the concepts covered in this class on YouTube.

Buy the book

Here’s the book on Amazon: Starting out with C++ Early Objects

I recommend getting a physical copy so you can have it open next to your computer while you work, and use your monitor(s) for your code and Stack Overflow. It’s the same book you use for CS161 (if you haven’t taken that yet, either), so at least you get two classes out of it. You can also buy the loose leaf edition to save some cash.

After two classes with it I can say it’s a good book. The examples are relevant to the coursework, they’re clear and easy to understand, and there are a good number of examples.

Start every week’s material the day it drops – and don’t count on weekends

Sometimes the new week will be released on a Friday. Sometimes a Saturday. Sometimes a Sunday! And no, the instructor doesn’t move that week’s deadline out just because you lost the weekend due to the materials not being released in a timely manner.

For this reason, I recommend setting up your life (at least for these 10 weeks) to allow for working on this class work during the week (ideally daily). Don’t expect to fit it all into the weekend. Even my light weeks were at least 15 hours spent on the class (usually closer to 25 or 30).

Check Piazza religiously

If they improve anything in CS162, I hope it’s the unclear assignment requirements. They requirements were notoriously bad – assignments are written in a conversational style and it’s hard to know what is really being asked for.

Many students took to Piazza (the class forum) to question (or worse, debate) the requirements until a TA or the instructor herself came along to clarify.

Pretty much every week went like this:

  1. New assignment comes out – oh no, it has unclear requirements
  2. Someone asks for clarification on Piazza
  3. TA makes a call and says do it X way
  4. 2 days later, another student asks the same question
  5. Different TA makes a different call on this new thread and says do it Y way
  6. They have a fight, triangle wins…
  7. You already coded it, so do you redo it to Y or keep it as X or what?

For what it’s worth, every time this happened (and I had already coded it), I kept my code the original way and still got 100% on the assignment.

Test on Flip!

So many things happened in my code in the Flip environment that did not happen on my Macbook. Weird things, too – things that weren’t easy to spot without thorough testing. I made the mistake of not testing on Flip until I thought I was done with the assignment, only to find heaps of bugs that only occurred in that environment.

Only after the class ended did I find out about this awesome way to use Git to deploy to Flip. (I was uploading in Filezilla like a n00b.)

Use Valgrind early and often

It’s a memory management tool that’s already installed on Flip and you won’t be able to find memory leaks without it. If you wait until you are done coding your assignment, it will be harder to find the memory leak. Upload your code and check it with Valgrind every so often and you will save yourself a lot of pain.

The worst weeks were weeks 1, 2, and the final project. 

Okay, they were all brutal. There were many weeks where I thought there was no way I would get everything done and I’m a workaholic. The biggest workloads were the first project (Langton’s Ant) and the final project at the end (make an adventure game).

You do actually have to contribute to the Canvas conversation topics

It’s a misguided requirement because these “conversation” threads quickly turn into 100+ people dumping commentary and links in one place. It’s not a conversation, it’s just a dogpile.

But if you contribute a few posts (I think I made 5 decent, paragraph-sized comments between January and March, evenly spaced throughout the quarter), it’s an easy 20 points that you will (probably) be very happy to have at the end.

Take every quiz twice

(Unless you get a great score the first time around, of course).

You get two attempts for each quiz. A quiz is 20 questions in 15 minutes. (I liked this format). Only the grade from the last attempt is kept. Questions are drawn from a larger pool, so you won’t get exactly the same ones the second time you take it.

My strategy was to use the first attempt to see what’s on the quiz and make my best guesses as to the answers. This gave me a feel for the questions and sometimes revealed tricky ones. I usually got about a 16/20 on my first try but Canvas tells you which ones you got wrong, and what the correct answers were, so this is a chance to see what you missed and study it some more. After a little studying I’d retake it, usually getting 18/20 or 19/20 that second time.

Grading

The final’s worth 15% of your grade, so save some steam for the end. There was a bonus, extra credit lab announced right at the last minute, too, but its points could only be applied to your lab grade.

  • Weekly labs – 30% of your grade
  • Quizzes – 15% of your grade
  • Projects – 30% of your grade
  • Group activities – 10% of your grade
  • Final project – 15% of your grade

Overall impression: OSU CS162

I hated it at times, but it was worth it. I never would have pushed through some of this stuff on my own, without a grade and a degree motivating me. OSU’s online CS is meant for people with a full-time job and the occasional signs of life outside of class but I had to take a couple days off work here and there to accommodate the workload, and I barely saw my family. The most difficult parts of this class – deciphering confusing and unclear requirements – were totally unnecessary. OSU should hire a proofreader and clean up CS162’s assignments. And some weeks the workload was just pure insanity – the week with the group project stands out in particular.

But… it’s over! And I got a 97%, so I’m going to take a much-deserved week to rest up for the next class.

Onwards to CS225!

Other student reviews of CS162

Leave a comment and I’ll update this post with your review!