What I learned

Still can’t believe this is the last thing I will do for OOP. Overall this class was above and beyond my expectation. I learned a lot of C++, OOP design concepts(mainly from the readings), dev tools(issue tracking, TravisCI, Docker) and testing. And I think all are very useful outside of this class.

Projects

The projects are actually my least favorite part of this class. I didn’t think collatz and netflix connected with what we were learning in class at that time and I didn’t find them interesting to implement. Allocator was conceptually the most interesting project to me, thought it’s pretty useful and helped me understand how the standard allocator works. Darwin and Life were better than the other ones because they actually required Object-Oriented design, the no getter and setter rule was a good challenge. Both of them also required a lot of tests, which was good excercise for writing unit tests. But overall, the last three projects served their purposes, just not very interesting.

Quizzes

I love the quizzes! Although a lot of them were tricky, it was a great way to test our understanding of the material. Especially since the exams are all coding and don’t require us to know as many details (C++ features) as the quizzes. I had to review the notes from last lecture to prepare for the quiz every class, so it helped me to stay on top of the materials in class.

Lectures

Lectures are the best! I love Downing’s teaching style! I do have one suggestion - please keep post the lecture notes on piazza! Piazza is a much nicer and easier platform to discuss materials from class compared to GitHub. But other than that, I loved the cold calls, wish I was called on more (:P only saying this because there’s no more class). I also really like how Dr. Downing gives us the test code, let us study the behavior of a certain class and then make us work together to implement it. It definitely helped me a lot!

Tests

Tests were fair, the grading for exam one was pretty fair as well. Test two looked a lot longer, and I was pretty stressed out during the exam fearing not able to finish it. Dr. Downing gave out good hints for what we should know for the exam. And I do like writing code on the exam!

Overall

I LOVE OOP AND DR. DOWNING! I’ve been recommending it to all my OS students and hopefully some of them will make the good decision and take this class :) I was challenged to pay full attention in class and feel very engaged in every lecture! I would love to take another class with Dr. Downing in the future! Thank you Dr. Downing for all the amazing lectures, answering my questions about C++ and helping me to make decisions with internships! Hope to keep in touch with you in the future :)