My Review of (INFO 2250) Survey of Programming Languages
Grade: A
Difficulty: 2/10
Rating: 4/10
Time commitment: 5 hours/week
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This course has an ambitious goal of surveying several major programming languages: C/C++, java, sql, html/xml, javascripts, C#, ruby. The lecture also covers the fundamentals like compiler, linking, object code, machine code, virtualization.
Assignments
- Weekly quiz: Each quiz is worth 1.82% of course grade. It usually took me less than 1 hour to complete. Open-book, untimed, multiple choice format.
- Weekly coding assignment: Each coding assignment is worth 2% of course grade. It's a lot of grunt work. But the professor gives away comprehensive template code which guides you the logical sequence of what you need to implement step by step. It usually took me a few hours at most.
- Exam: One midterm and one final. These are essentially all homework assignments combined. As long as you review the homework, it'll be fine. Overall, reasonable difficulty.
Thoughts
The instructor (Tim Niesen) hand-made all the lecture materials including some fancy animations to illustrate concepts. He has positive friendly energy and actively answers questions on the forum. His coding assignment has a strict style enforcement. If you don't adhere to it, he is unforgiving, and you will lose a lot of points. It's mostly things like your variables/functions must follow certain naming conventions. The grading standard is lenient.