I wonder how 6.00x and cs50x compare to a typical community college course.

My first java class was ******ed easy, this one is surprisingly difficult. I think the problem is rather than focus on a couple of advanced topics and cover them in depth, he picked a whole ****load of topics and barely touches the surface on them.

I''m not talking about letting the url bar auto-complete your url. I'm talking about people who type 'www.google.com' then type in 'www.twoplustwo.com' into the search bar then click on the search result. These people actually believe Google is the internet.

A lot of non-technical people don't even get what the URL is or does.

They depend on their home page to either load Google or MSN and then they search. I've watched many people who use IE which loads the MSN page by default type in "google" into the MSN search box and then google for what they really want to find.

Often times the thing they want to find is the domain name too, but they don't type in the w's or .com. In your case they would have just typed "twoplustwo".

I will shamefully admit that more often than I should I end up typing some_brand_name.com into the url/search bar when I don't know a company's domain. Basically doing some ****** combination of a search and a url.

For certain, there are lots of sites that aren't the intuitive company-name.com. But when you are using google as the front-end of the web for things like ebay... just yuck. I kid you not, I've seen people who sell on ebay who use google search to type in ebay.com and I've seen people go the the domain they own using google. It's like, really, you own this website and you don't understand that it is completely disconnected from google? Don't even ask them to try to find the ftp server because, you know, google doesn't index that stuff.

I don't have a big enough sample for "typical", but when I was in Miami, I took a community college class and it was a joke. I then saw the curriculum for what they teach in CCSF, and it looked fairly rigorous, but SF may be an outlier.

Anyone know what a service handler is and why does my yahoo mail want to install it?

I'm packing up to move to a new place, and trying to declutter my life. Can't decide what to do with the 50-60 programming books I have. I figure I might be a boss someday with a big bookshelf to fill. Or who knows maybe Enterprise JavaBeans will become the next big thing again.

I really hope I get the chance to use my XSLT cookbook again someday. Such a fun language.

Trying to remember my university Java class. I think it was pretty good actually. Didn't just teach Java but also some algorithms and data structures (I remember some of the exercises involved building doubly linked lists and some trees).

There was also a second class that had an entry exam (you talked about some codebase for two lectures and then had to implement a class/method or something that passed an autotest in ~30 minutes that added some feature to said codebase...pretty good concept imo). If you passed this test you were put into a group of ~8 (too big imo) and had to complete a given project until the end of the semester, time allocation was 100% up to the group. I think ours was an instant messanger with away/dnd etc. was somewhat interesting

Every time I move I get rid of a few more books. I even got rid of my algorithms text book last time. Kind of sad but there really is no point in me keeping them.

i knew your algorithms seemed rusty lately....

I don't think I can blame getting rid of my textbook. I still have my Design Patterns book but I'm even rustier at those.

Dunno how well you all know point and click adventures but I have a somewhat obscure naming question...

I'm currently building a minigame and I'm implementing the UI as being all mouse driven. Old school point and click games used to have verbs like "take", "talk to" etc.
I'll just need "use", "look" and "talk" for now and have implemented it as a simple list that I cycle through on right click so it starts out as ["use", "look", "talk"] -> "use" is the currently active verb so if you left-click on some item on the screen it results in use(cool_item). If I want to look at the item I'd right-click -> the current verb becomes "look" and then click on the item...anyways my question:

What would you name the class that handles this stuff. I've currently named it "Verbs" but I've actually added some more functionality already (right click also changes the cursor to correspond to the verb...well erm currently it's just three colors but should be a magnifying glass etc. down the road :P)...I was thinking UIHandler?!

UIHandler seems maybe too generic. How about...
ClickHandler
ClickActionHandler
ClickManager
CursorHandler
CursorManager

Use, look and talk are all "actions". I would start with that. A verb is an action but who the heck names a class Verbs haha.

Edit:

I'm not a fan of "Handler" type classes or using something like GameActions. It's kind of obvious what it's for without the prefix. InputActions might be a reasonable compromise though because that really defines it.

ActionList?

The name originated from scribbling the Monkey Island UI on a piece of paper from memory and thinking...ok we got a background, the player, the verbs, an inventory
Actions is pretty good, using that for other places...get_action >> get_verb lol

I might just go with Actions, don't really like the XXXList type names because more often than not it changes from a list to something else. Naming conventions from my old job was along the line of "always use plural and not xxx_dict, xxx_list etc" which is good practice imo

Yeah my first instinct was to go with Actions. A minute later I thought about InputActions because in the future you might have other things in the game that are actions which are not involved with player input but then that made me think about YAGNI.

I would worry about changing it from Actions to something else when it actually becomes a problem.

We've been doing a lot of data structure stuff which i really enjoy and stretches my understanding.

This may be ******ed of me but i just figured out how useful the for-each loop is for traversing collections, like holy ****. I was using iterators before, no one even told me about for-each.

Is an iterator faster?? I assume for-each uses one underneath and it's just an easier way to write it. Stackoverflow didnt seem to have a definitive answer

You most likely will never have to worry about the speed of an un-nested loop. Iterators and foreach will both be about the same.

Which for me brings up an interesting question and will google to find out, can one disassemble byte code IE are there mnemonics for byte code?

Edit: yep

byte code mnemonics

This is why I buy kindle books when I can. They have down sides but 0 space is important to me.
banish this line of thinking from your head and profit. How clearly the code communicates intent is what you want to optimize.

I agree about what you say about communicating intent. I mean yeah that is the most productive approach. Sometimes people get curious about details and knowing details can be instructive in how things function but that knowledge is not necessarily all that useful.

On the books, I made a decision a while back if I can't obtain it on my kindle and or iPad it goes. It still might go even if I can.

Chips, alright, will do

Just finished the midterm. It's such a brutal course layout - we had a 2 hour lecture before the test, with only 10 minutes in between lecture and exam.

Everyone was giving me **** in the hallway because I was looking up design pattern stuff, because he casually mentioned right before the test there were "5 or 6" questions on design patterns. I counted 12 on mine. Study guide was like 60% Collections questions, 30% Generic programming questions, 10% Swing questions. What was the test? 80% swing hahahaha. I swear to god I only knew for sure maybe 10 questions of 100 so I thought I bombed it.

Luckily he curves it, I got a 72%, but that doesn't include a few questions he's gonna give us credit for because they were worded poorly/unclear. So, say a 75%. I'm usually on the upper end of the curve and people that were in the hallway didn't even know what design patterns were so I think I'm pretty safe with an A or a high B unless some douchenozzle luckboxed an A.

edit: I shouldn't be complaining, because I just looked at the questions I missed, and only a couple of them were Swing questions. The most infuriating one was I didn't know if the class was called "PrinterJob" or "PrintJob" and guessed wrong. Also guessed "getKeySet()" when the answer was "keySet()". Ugh.