I’ve added a page with an overview of Assignments 4, 5, and 6 (also in the sidebar under “Assignments”). Comments most welcome on the general project / product; questions for Assignment 4 and ActiveRecord specifically will be more appropriate for the page on Assignment 4, which will be appearing shortly…
While working on the page that will display Ruby style suggestions, I discovered that the 800 width was really not too hot for code snippets.
So I have hacked the theme to assume that the screen is 1024 pixels wide or larger. Even if you are in that 14% (probably less now) of users with an 800-pixel wide screen, the main page area still fits within that width.
There are still a couple of widths that are funky (e.g., for comments) and I had to lose (for now) the banner image and the background behind the sidebar, but those will come back in some form.
As you will recall, I set up this site so that books ordered on Amazon through it (and I also put some links on my personal blog) would generate referral earnings.
Well, we’ve now earned $144.53, which we will be spent on ourselves [i.e., people in the course] toward the end of the semester . . . for food and drink at some kind of post-meeting event.
I have posted a summary of the survey here:
http://e168f07.7fff.com/private/docs/
What do we know a lot about? HTML+Web apps, languages, and databases. In the chart, I put Advanced and Intermediate together and calculated their sum. The chart is ordered by that, and then the data is stacked for Advanced, Intermediate, and Beginner. There’s a second chart for what we don’t know about.
Next time I do this survey, I will be adding the following skill categories: JavaScript/Ajax/DHTML, Microsoft SQL Server, Python, J2EE/JavaEE, and XML/XSLT/XPATH.
Microsoft languages seem to be in decline. I was shocked that few students seem to do DB2 anymore (DB2 has its roots in the original SQL research by Codd). Few in the group have no experience with Java. Few have no knowledge of at least one database. Good.
Also, on the positive side, C is hanging in there, which is good because it promotes an understanding of machine organization.
Instant Messaging has significant penetration, with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) still being the leading IM client, but not by much; Google’s GTalk is hard on its heals. About half of you are using Feed Aggregators for RSS, and Google Reader is in the lead there. I was surprised the so few people use Bloglines.
A significant majority of students have laptops, and Windows still reigns.
A majority of you think the course will be moderately difficulty; the others say it will be hard. On average, you believe that a reasonable number of hours for class preparation is 8 hours, and that the number of hours you will actually have to prepare is about the same. I also broke this average out by estimated difficulty, and the results were what I would expected: Those who think the course will be moderately difficulty think it will be about a 6 hour commitment outside of class, while those who guess it will be hard say 9 to 10 hours.
I will summarize the information about those who have expertise to share after I contact them.
If you have any additional observations, please post them here as comments. You will observe that the data doesn’t seem to add up in some cases: That’s because some people left blanks, and/or I was scoring this while my daughter was running around distracting me.
I may blog at some point about these results at my personal blog: A lot to think about!
Assignment 2, Question 12 is about the growth of the population of organisms in petri dishes. There was an error in one of the generation calculations for the example scenario. I replaced that bit with a somewhat longer description of the problem, with tables that show how the dishes array is calculated at each generation. I think this should be clarifying. So if you’re working on Question 12, make sure to get the newest version of the PDF.
Also, a student asked: May I alter the values in the dishes Array? The answer is: Yes. I think it can be done without overwriting the dishes Array — you would do it by duplicating the prior generation (dishes.dup) or by creating a new Array based on the old one (Array.new(dishes)). However, this might make the solution look a lot messier.
Help, my title caught an alliteration disease!
1.) I’ve added a resource called cheatsheets to the course site. Check it out for help remembering all the basics; I’ll be adding to it throughout the course as appropriate.
2.) Though I think people are mostly set on the installs now, yesterday we did post the OSX install screencast. Maybe your friends will find it useful, after you’ve shown them John’s rails screencast and gotten them to jump on the RoR bandwagon too.
3.) Someone asked about my own blog. It is at www.thirdbit.net. Sometimes I post reports of idiot bugs I’ve found in my own code, and I’m sure that reading those will cause people in my section no end of amusement. As I think I said in the first class, I was briefly famous for a post entitled 10 things you should know about method_missing. I will be cross-posting some of the stuff here on my own site, if it’s relevant and useful to the wider Ruby community.
Welcome!
This is the blog and course site for Harvard Extension’s Computer Science E-168, “Building Web-Based Software with Ruby and Ruby on Rails.”
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