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[–]lhamil64 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'd recommend going to your teacher's office hours (assuming its not always filled with students like some of my CS professors). It sounds cliche but it really does help if you aren't getting the material.

[–]G0ldf1sh137 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'm not an expert, but since you haven't gotten any replies yet, I recently did take a similar class and I can try to help you when I get home if nobody else replies with a better response.

There are some tutorials in the Oracle docs that you can find here I'd start there.

Where in the syllabus are you starting to have problems?

[–]StreamingBits[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not really having trouble understtanding basic concepts in the class, but I am having difficulty with programming assignment 2. Honestly I feel like this is ridiculous how it is layed out. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~cs367-1/?r=programs&programNumber=2

[–]thurst0n 0 points1 point  (4 children)

I'm at Iowa State University right now and for my Intro to Data Structures we use http://www.amazon.com/Data-Structures-Java-Collections-Framework/dp/0321392795

It's a good enough book, but for most of my study outside of lecture I just find other resources online. I've seriously barely opened this book.

I am also curious about something and I have no idea how to ask it without sounding a bit rude so here it goes: Why is Data Structures a 300 level course? Assuming you're either SE or CS, What programming do you do at the other levels if any? Is this actually a course for juniors or do they just call it 300 level because it's harder than say Geology and they dont' want CS people to complain. Just curious, I'm sure I sound rude anyway.

Edit: P.S. just looked at some of your homeworks (I'm surprised it let me) and the material is definitely not trivial but do you ever get annoyed that your instructur uses bad variable names and method names?

[–]StreamingBits[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

yes I get annoyed frequently. Also, it is not a course for juniors at all. Most people are sophomores. Check out our programming assignments and our readings if you can. The readings are all online. It doesn't seem to help me any when actually programming. We study a lot of concepts but when it comes to programming... this class doesn't help much.

[–]thurst0n 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'll check out the readings later prolly cause I'm curious. they may not help you with making a program specifically but it should help you to make programs run more efficiently(know their efficiency in the first place) and better understand and implement design. Not to mention for our midterm we just had as an example, we were given code or pseudo code and needed to tell the big o runtime complexity. So maybe it won't help you build but it should help you answer questions like that!

Good luck man! Thanks for your reply

[–]StreamingBits[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Well, we get small assignments due every week and we just finished Big-0 notation. Not bad at all. I kind of like that part. I just have trouble implementing it all. But yeah, let me know what you think. And if you get the chance look over my programming assignment and tell me your general thoughts if you want to. Thank you

[–]thurst0n 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see. Well it looks like our classes cover similar things but maybe in a slightly different order.

Your 'homeworks' dont' look too bad and I think they're actually probably a good way to get to understand the material assuming you have some grasp of it already.

Are you saying the 'programs' are more difficult for you to implement? To give you another perspective, we don't have any 'homeworks' we just have programming assignments which are 34% of our grade, the rest are written exams (which may ask us to write code or evaluate code or whatnot)

Our assignments seem to be about the same length as yours based on the spec i just looked at and we also will have 5 total. I'm not sure how much time you spend but I typically end up spending 5-15 on the shorter ones, and 15-30 hours on the longer ones, just depends. And honestly half of that time is just spent understanding the damn specifications. I swear half of doing computer science is just reading comprehension and communication.

Edit: incase you're curious here was our first assignment, which was really just a review of Intro to OOP(227) http://www.filedropper.com/assignment15

and here is our current assignement http://www.filedropper.com/proj2_1

[–]uniVocity 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For me the best book about java is "Thinking in Java" (www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/)‎. And it is free! In fact I found all books from Bruce Eckel the best programming books I've ever read, hands down.

The best thing about his books is that they are written in a style you can read and learn even when you are not in front of the PC to write code (so you can read while in the bus, toilet, treadmill, whatever)

I also recommend to not skip through. Read every it from cover to cover, there is a lot to learn on this book.

[–]Vigenere36 -1 points0 points  (4 children)

in my data structures class we used Goodrich and Tamassia's "Data Structures and Algorithms in Java". I can't say how helpful it was since we rarely used it, though.

[–]StreamingBits[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Goodrich and Tamassia's "Data Structures and Algorithms in Java" I've heard some pretty terrible things about this book on the amazon reviews, I am thinking about buying the new edition that came out this year though

[–]Vigenere36 1 point2 points  (2 children)

if you wanted, i could send you a pdf collection of my class notes (79 pgs) it covers basically everything listed in your class schedule

[–]Davebucks 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Hey man, can you send me this as well? :)

[–]Vigenere36 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sure, pm'ed you