Starting Afresh In Life

It's January 2014, new year, new start, and my second university term has started for about 3 weeks. We've covered Object Oriented Programming pretty nicely in CSC148 (computer science cource at UofT), even touching upon making our own classes. I'm someone who's highly interested in programming, so I already knew about user-defined classes, instances, and attributes in OOP languages (such as Turing, VB6, Java).

However, CSC148 was quite a big change for me. I have learned new things about classes and instances of user-defined classes, mainly about manipulation between the two. The initial example the professor had shown to the class, about the class Turtle, showed me how applying methods and variables to the class (i.e. doing Turtle.neck = "green") would cause said methods and variables to be applied to all instances of that class, including previously created instances. Additionally, I have learned about __methods__ other than __init__, which have proven to be useful and more efficient than creating my own versions of those __methods__.

Lastly, I had touched upon inheritance in Java, but with the introduction of composition, the two have becoming slightly fuzzy to my understanding. It may be a lack of understanding of inheritance, or just prolonged period of time with no presence of inheritance in my own programs, but inheritance and composition feel no different to me, which is wrong since there would only be one if they were the same.

I should do small side projects outside of the assigned exercises and labs require for this course to strengthen my understanding of whatever programming concepts seem blurry to me.

This isn't the end, this is just the beginning,

See you all next week -

Raymond.