Comments for Garfield Computer Science

Comment on Great advice from ’09/’10 AP CS! by Nathan Hesterberg

Nathan Hesterberg — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:15:55 +0000

I’m Nathan Hesterberg. I’m not as good as my brother. Someday, I’m going to marry John Christiansen and we’ll dance sassy dances in our sassy pantses all night long.

PEACE!

Comment on Master of the Universe. by Gus

Gus — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:22:33 +0000

Here’s some relevance I guess.

http://myapokalips.com/public/cartoons/021_Robot_Tattoo.png

Comment on Robot activities by Jason Evans

Jason Evans — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:55:43 +0000

for i in range(50):
mood = “soo confuusing”
jasonsmood= ” i get it”
jasonsnewmood=”i dont get it”
while(jasonsmood != jasonsnewmood):
print mood
else:
print “i get it”

Comment on Extra Credit: read a book! by Will McNutt

Will McNutt — Thu, 20 May 2010 02:37:35 +0000

This is a brief discussion of the book The C Programming Language, by Brian W. Kernichan and Dennis M. Ritchie, with a primary focus on its content. For sake of the anticipated audience, this will be written from a perspective which assumes a knowledge of the Java programming language. C was initially designed by Dennis Ritchie (one of the authors of The C Programming Language), for use on a Unix operating system. Created in the 1970′s, C is one of the oldest programming languages still commonly used, although these days its primary function seems to be as a language for building operating systems, compilers, and other such low-level software.
The C programming language adheres to a procedural programming paradigm, with the object-oriented paradigm central to Java, among other paradigms, being noticeably absent. As such, methods may logically be treated as static instances, therefore making those methods functions, rather than methods. Additionally, C only offers single-threaded program reading, making for invariably linear programming. Significantly, unlike in Java, C offers no automated garbage collection. In a large-scale program where memory constraints have a great deal of importance, memory overflow will occur if garbage collection is not done, which requires the program to manually perform garbage collection. To do that, pointers must be used.
Pointers are essentially references to a particular location in a system’s memory, often pointing to a variable or even a function. With a pointer or pointers, garbage collection can be removed through manipulation of that pointer. This has both positive and negative effects: manually programming the deallocation of system memory does not often lend itself to legibility in coding, however, it also allows for greater freedom and efficiency of related processes.
To briefly summarize the language: C is a much more powerful language than Java owing to its lower-level “bare metal” approach (Java was built on C), however for many it is a very difficult language, simply because in order to use it properly and to its full extent, one must be careful and be able to write elegant code. Furthermore, while the C Standard Library provides a myriad of functions, many methods and routines readily available in other, more modern languages must be hand-coded. On the book itself, it is particularly well-written and presents information with a marked level of clarity difficult to find elsewhere. Be warned though: C is not a language for one-line solutions to all your coding problems.

Comment on Extra Credit: read a book! by Ben Chun

Ben Chun — Sat, 15 May 2010 23:49:49 +0000

Everything and More is great! There’s no one quite like DFW was as a writer. Definitely really helpful in understanding the achievements of calculus. And inspirational as well: http://www.benchun.net/2008/11/everything-and-more/

Comment on Extra Credit: read a book! by Evan Sanders

Evan Sanders — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:20:25 +0000

The book that I read was On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. The book was about how our ever expanding knowledge of the brain can be used to make smarter computers.

The bits of the book about memory and how the brain uses that information for predicting future events was the most interesting part for me. Basically the brain interprets all information as patterns, and it can use these recurring patterns to make predictions. Oooooooh!

Comment on Networks by Michael Rosenberger

Michael Rosenberger — Wed, 12 May 2010 01:48:03 +0000

The visual traceroute is awesome! Just wasted 15 minutes tracing packets from all sorts of sites in Asia and stuff.

Comment on Extra Credit: read a book! by Andrew McNutt

Andrew McNutt — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:00:14 +0000

I read the book everything and more: acompact history of infinity by david foster wallace (http://www.amazon.com/Everything-More-Compact-Infinity-Discoveries/dp/0393003388).

From the start the book declared that its project was to explain the idea of Infinite Sets, and how there are different sizes of infinity. It does this by explaining all the math that leads up to that idea (2500 years aprox) from Zeno to Aristotle to Newton to Cantor. Its rough going.

However the ideas prsented are very powerful and have applications all over. To wit, it deeply explains set theory, and all the ins and outs of it. Mid way through this explaination it casually says ‘oh and set theory gradually became the basis for programming arrays’…

Highly recomended. But difficult.

Comment on Lists tutorial by Ms. Martin

Ms. Martin — Tue, 04 May 2010 00:15:04 +0000

Of course you did because you rock! *virtual high five*

And remember, practice makes more awesome…

Comment on Lists tutorial by Jason Evans

Jason Evans — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:27:16 +0000

That was alot to deal with but the funny thing was i “ACTUALLY” understood it in a way
i am != going to forget this