A New Semester, New Self Taught Unix

In an effort to score some extra credit for my summer class at UT, I return to this blog. The topics will probably be much more Computer Science-y than previous posts, so you are warned if you're not a visitor from my class.

I am taking CS378, which is a course on the Standard Template Library (STL) and Generic Programming in C++. The class is taught by Professor Downing, who I've not had the pleasure of having yet at UT, and so far it's a pretty interesting course. Fortuitously I took a course on C++ last semester, so a lot the intro of the course is familiar ground. (Though I am now dreading returning to Java since it's been almost a year since I had to use it...).

For this week's post I'm going to talk about the first assignment for the class, which I finished up on Sunday. The task was to write a program to solve a variation of the Collatz problem. That part of the assignment was a breeze, even the added component of inserting some variation of a cache to speed up the computation. The more difficult part of the assignment was learning (teaching myself) how to use the infrastructure required for the course. In particular, this class requires a project host (with issue tracker and wiki) and a source control repository. And as I am learning is a recurring theme in CS courses at UT, I had to develop a slightly deeper skill set of Unix commands.

Having completed the Biochemistry program at UT it's very interesting comparing the styles of teaching in that program to the ones in the CS department. Biochem tended to be very hand holding on the practical aspects and intensely rigorous on the theory, while CS appears to do the opposite. I don't mean to say that theory courses or tests in CS are easy, but in my experience they're easier than my previous studies. However the amount of skill I've been required to develop either on my own or with fellow students is staggering in CS as compared to Biochem. The funny thing is I think I might like the CS style more, but then again I'm a bit of a masochist.