Course over (pretty much)

Well, I have to admit that this blog was forgotten. However, with the lack of response to the blog, it was hard to stay committed. For someone that doesn't really blog, it felt rather odd to write a blog that noone reads. I'm sure that the TA's and professor were busy with other stuff, but more feedback on the blog would have been nice.

Well onto the course itself. Overall, I found the course to be pretty difficult. The amount of course work to be done was pretty huge. With something to do every week, whether it was a problem set, an assignment, or a test, there was never any time to relax and just take in the material. It would have been great if there was one week per month with nothing stressful from the course. The high work load of the course often conflicted with other courses and lead to many sleepless nights. Bad time management on my behalf was probably to blame, but nonetheless I found the amount of work from this course to have been far greater than that of any other course.

As for the material of the course, at the beginning, it wasnt too bad with the stuff on induction, but as the course progressed, it managed to get more and more confusing. Around the point of program correctness, I was just completely confused. There wasn't any time to just slow down and slowly understand everything. However, near the end at regular expressions, things started making more sense. It helped that in CSC207 regular expressions were also being used, so it brought about a better understanding of the material. CSC207 gave regular expressions a purpose and a feeling of practical use. As opposed to a lot of the other material that was just theory, regular expressions served a purpose and was actually useful. The material on DFSA's was pretty interesting, but the textbook's wording on NFSA's was pretty confusing. However, the lecture did help clear things up.

In short, the course was pretty hard. It covered difficult material and had a lot of course work. For the course, I didn't really know anyone in my classes, so I had to do all of the work myself. It would have been good to have worked on assignments with other people to help reduce the stress, but I'm pretty anti-social at times and find it hard to approach people. Well, that is one thing I found good about blogging, I can say and express things I normal wouldn't be able to in real life. Anyways, despite the difficult content, the lectures explained the material pretty well, though professor Heap's writing is hard to read sometimes.

I do regret my lack of proper time management as it probably would have helped me do far better in the course. However, there is still the exam, so there's still some stress left from the course. Might as well begin to manage my time better for studying for the exam.

I thank the professor and TA's for their help with this course. Despite the difficult and sometimes boring content, they managed to make light of the material and teach it well. There were many parts of the course that I enjoyed and found interesting, as well as parts I didn't enjoy. But overall, it was a good experience.