First Quarter Assignment

1. How well did you meet your original goals for your project this quarter? Please be ''specific''. What were your original goals? What did you actually accomplish? How do these compare? Why?

I believe I did fairly well completing my goals for the quarter. My original goal was to learn the C language to the best of my ability. The brief one hour class periods didn't allow me to learn as much as i would have liked but still allowed me to get a firm grasp of the basics of the language. What I actually accomplished is, from no prior knowledge of the language, to have worked through the first chapter of the C Programming Language book and the majority of the second chapter. I had hoped to work through this language a little faster but am fairly pleased with my progress, especially in recent weeks.

2. Did your project turn out the way you planned? What unexpected things did you encounter during the quarter?

For the most part the project turned out as I planned. The most unexpected things i faced was the complexity of the C book I was using, and the expectation of prior knowledge it was built on. It was far more in depth when dealing with memory and often dealt less with actual programming.

3. What did you learn this quarter?

This quarter i learned the basic structure of C programming, along with the functions of several libraries and how to access them. These libraries include and

4. What can you do now that you couldn't do when you started?

I can now write programs in C which can solve a variety of problems and do many basics tasks. I have yet to write any programs of any real complexity but can generally write a long, simple program to accomplish basically the same thing.

5. What things did you hope to do that you can't do yet?

I hoped to get further into the C book and deal with longer and more complex programs. I especially wanted to learn enough useful programming to be able to get an internship working as a programmer. I know I am not even close to having this extent of expertise, but will continue to work towards this goal.

6. Will you continue with this project next quarter? Why or why not?

So far I am undecided whether to continue with C in class, or work with Java. I'm going to do some research over this weekend and try to determine which will be more useful in my professional life. If I continue with C I'll keep working on the C Programming book along with several online tutorials and most likely at least one other book from the classroom. If I switch to Java, or a different language, I'll request a book on the subject and most likely consult an online tutorial as well.

Scratch

I'm still finishing the scratch project but im on the verge of completing it, at least to the current specifications. The program asks you how many bats there are and responds to the user input correctly every time.

10-29-09

I spent the entire period working on the scratch program that Mr Elkner asked me to try. Its almost done, all i have left is to have the game not start until the person chooses the correct number of bats and add in a background and maybe some sounds.

10-27-09

The class period ended yesterday before I had a chance to post in my blog so I'm posting it now: I started on Scratch yesterday. When asked to create a version of the fly counting game where the number of flies is random I had the idea to use the random number generator. It creates a random number, either 0 or 1, and shows the sprite if the number is one.

Previous Code

Here is the aforementioned Code which converts lower case letters to binary. I'll clean this up and find a way to write a function that will hopefully accomplish this with much less code. http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfbtpmh3_3dnkgvn4m
I read over most of chapter 2 today and looked at some of the exercises for chapter three.

Text to Binary

Once again I spent the period working on exercises from the C Programming Language book. I've been struggling with a few of the exercises from the end of the first chapter but I'm confident that i can work it out soon. I also still had trouble copying the program i made from vim to google documents but will work on that.

Technical Trouble

I worked on a single program for the whole period. I'm making an English to Binary translater in C. Thus far the translater only converts lower case letters, but, given more time, I could easily have it convert upper case letters and numbers, as well as any special characters I choose. When trying to publish this code on a google document I ran into some trouble. I had it all but solved just as I had to leave for the bus and will post said code tomorrow.

Back to Basics

After perusing several other tutorials and books for the past week or so i finally feel confident enough to return to my 'The C Programming Language' book and pick up where i left off. I went over every exercise in the first chapter today and completed most of them. Those i didnt do were simply too bulky or simple to worry about.

Programming with C

I've been looking through a new book entitled Programming with C. More specifically I've been dealing with memory allocation and working grasp the concept more fully. I'm also now trying out new programming challenges from Cprogramming.com which are a nice change from the ones offered in The C Programming Language.

Beginner's Guide to C

I spent the period reading through one the the C tutorial books entitled The Beginner's Guide to C. The book is somewhat helpful in certain aspects but after looking over the different sections all period I've concluded its probably better used as a reference book to supplement what I learn in the other books. It probably wouldn't be very useful as a main source as it skips around compared to other tutorials I've seen.

Tuesday October 13

Today I spent the period working on the Cprogramming website. I was introduced to several new functions including strcmp and strcat which i am still working to fully understand. I have the basic idea of both and am planning on reading up more on them at home as we have no class tomorrow.

Week 5

Monday 10-5-09

I stayed home sick today but took some time to read over basic Java script.

Tuesday 10-6-09

To avoid further confusion with the "C Programming Language" book I spend today supplementing my knowledge with a C beginner tutorial on http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html This has been helping me a great deal as it fills in gaps left by the C book which assumes a proficiency in many things i have no experience in.

Wednesday 10-7-09

With what I've learned on http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html I spend most of the period going back to the C book and determining which questions had been answered and which have still yet to be explained. I went back and forth between the two tutorials and so far it seems a much better method of learning than using one of the two on their own. The online tutorial give more detail on simple subjects while the hard copy counterpart give a more general challenge.

Thursday 10-8-09

I spent the majority of the period on the online tutorial. particularly helpful has been the explanation of strings it offers and a far more comprehensible section on arrays. however the Event functions were somewhat unhelpful so i reached out to third and fourth sources to help me. after reading the explanations offered by others i feel far more confident on the topic.

Friday 10-9-09

With my decision to create an artifical life program for my science fair project finally definite i consulted Mr Elkner. He said, and i agree, that it would be best to make this program in Python. My only concern so far has been which visual program to use. Most likely I will use Jython when writing the program so i can write the majority in Python with only the visual aspect being handled in Java script.

Week 4

9-28-09

I'm still working on having a more complete knowledge of functions in C. I'm particularly stumped by the function
int atoi(char s[])
{
int i, n;

n = 0;
for (i = 0; s[i] >= '0' && s[i] <= '9'; ++i)
n = 10 * n + (s[i] - '0');
return n;
}

9-29-09

Mr. Elkner is helping me better understand data types. I'm going to start to learn both binary and hexadecimal. I need to learn this to properly understand the previously mentioned atoi function. I was given Mr. Elkner's definition of a data type, "A data type is an interpretation of bit patterns." I'm still sorting through exactly what this means but what I've read so far in the Kernighan and Ritchie book is starting to make more sense.

9-30-09

I spent the whole period studying binary on http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Courses/152/97F/Readings/student-binary. So far I know integer conversion and some basic arithmatic in binary though the part of the tutorial about multiplication and division is slightly unclear. I'm going to look through other sites to find a better, more detailed guide.

10-1-09

I've finished studying regular binary and am now working on hexadecimal. I'm using http://www.lyzrdstomp.com/binary/hex1.html as a tutorial I've just about learned everything I currently need on the subject for my purposes and am looking over the ANCII chart.

10-2-09

With my study of binary and hexadecimal done for the time being I spent a portion of the period discussing both the programming competition and java with Mr. Elkner. The idea seems to be a promising one as he described java as similar to C. We also discussed C++ and object oriented programming which I hope to explore further as my proficiency with C improves.