I touched on some of the biggest hurdles for me in this course in my previous SLOG post, but I will do my best to reiterate some of them here. One of the major ones was certainly recursion. The whole idea of a function calling itself in its own definition is still rather confusing, but I found that it helps to think of it as solving a large problem by breaking it down into smaller and smaller problems until solving it becomes trivially easy. For instance, in all recursive problems on assignment 3, one has to take care of the special case in which the tree is one node long, and in all other cases the function can recursively call itself over and over until the problem is sufficiently broken down. Other difficulties for me were with understanding all the proper syntax that was needed for object oriented programming with classes. This problem was a lot less specific than the recursion problem. All I can really say about this one is that many times I would read implementation of code for certain functions and have no idea what I was looking at, only to find out that what it was was a very simple concept masked behind some syntax that I couldn't quite decipher.
To prepare for the final exam, I will have to go over all the labs that I missed due to the TA strike, as well as option A for the third assignment, since although we only technically had to do one of those options, I'm guessing knowing how to do both would be helpful. In any case, I've got lots of studying to do and am hoping for the best on the final exam.
