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Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Humble pie in academia


Eric.    (01)

Your comments are very much appreciated.    (02)

It's perhaps appropriate that there are a couple of things I want from 
this experience. One is redoing very old calculator programs I made in 
Java; those may be good companions for editors and wordprocessors.
Another is to become better attuned mentally to some of the stuff on our 
forums. A third is to improve my judgment about course conduct and study 
materials. Finally, there is the challenge ...    (03)

I'll have to scout for your reference; I'll do some checking locally 
tomorrow, on the way to college. You say that java.awt.* is outdated. 
That is precisely what we are in: JBuilder + awt + object-oriented 
programming all in one go - and without a textbook to support this 
approach. All I have a pages of code with some explanations about 
control statements and algorithms, which are the very things I don't 
need to be told about.    (04)

While writing this I received the post from down-under's Stephen. Yes, 
your description kind of covers what I am seeing, but things got to link 
up at some points here and there. It is interesting that the texts I 
have recommend that GUI stuff be delayed to well into the course. The 
thing is that in my humble opinion as a retired educator there is just 
too much thrown around too fast for comfort for those without OO 
background, and that in a junior college.    (05)

At any rate, I simply felt compelled to email the instructor that there 
is no point in me writing a midterm next week without having had a 
chance to study the course material - which is largely absent. Luckily, 
my son, who is also attending the course, has OO background. So, I need 
not be stuck in the long run - but, damn it!, I want to see decent 
course notes and not do some shooting in the dark.    (06)

And Stephen, you are darn right about the Alice-in-Wonderland verbiage 
authors use. They just don't get tired of drawing parallels with 
physical objects that lose their meaning in a maze of spagghetti code.    (07)

Thanks for the responses. When I flunk I can say, "There, if it were not 
for the grace of God, goes Eric or Stephen."    (08)

Henry    (09)

P.S. I tried ls -l | grep ....\..*
No joy here.    (010)


Eric Armstrong wrote:    (011)

>Henry K van Eyken wrote:
>
>  
>
>>..the Java course is challenging me almost beyond endurance.
>>    
>>
>
>I had a rough time getting a grip on object-oriented concepts. Until I did,
>Java was a total mystery. The first couple of chapters of my book (The
>JBuilder Bible) cover the basics, and the middle chapters cover more
>advanced topics.
>
>Focus on chapters 2, 12, and 13. They capture understandings I was
>able to gather from Allen Holub and Steve Abell, without which I could
>not have made the strides necessary to work with the language.
>
>Unfortunately, the remainder of the book is horribly outdated, as Swing
>is the GUI library du jour (the book uses AWT) and the Collections
>classes beat the heck out of the arrays and vectors I had to use when
>writing.
>
>  
>
>>N.B. Simple sample question from the UNIX exam: give a command to
>>seggregate from a list of files those with four-character names. (By
>>straight file manipulation; no scripts.)
>>    
>>
>
>Sounds like ls -l | grep ....\..*
>
>How close am I?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  
>    (012)