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I had the opposite experience: while the lectures were quite good, the exercises were many times confusing and frustrating - they kept refusing my solution beca

by cdman 14y ago

I had the opposite experience: while the lectures were quite good, the exercises were many times confusing and frustrating - they kept refusing my solution because there were hidden assumptions, not stated clearly in the problem definition.

pramode 14y ago
That's strange - I did not have any difficulty with the exercises and found them to be clearly specified! All the exercise problems were neatly broken down into small functions - you simply had to fill up the body of the functions!
- bazzargh 14y ago
  The exercises were not all that difficult (especially given that there were unit tests for almost all of them), but they did have issues. Some of the tests required you to use functions that didn't appear until one or two lectures later. Most likely the GP is complaining about the fact that the server-side tests were on bigger datasets than the ones that shipped with the code; but that wasn't a big issue as you could keep resubmitting up to the deadline. I found it useful to remember that almost all of the solution functions were very short; most were one line, some up to five; if you were writing long functions you're most likely doing it wrong. Similarly, the local tests should finish almost instantaneously. If they take 30s with the local dataset, they'll time out with the larger dataset on the server.
bad_user 14y ago
From my experience with the first iteration of this course and with the problems experienced by people on the course forum ... 99.99% of problems came from NOT reading the assignment. I went through all the homework and passed the course with the maximum grade. Except for the last homework where I too was guilty of the above, all submissions took the maximum grade from the first try. I don't remember encountering any confusing problem definition and even if a problem is confusing to you, there were plenty of people available on the forum and all you had to do was to ask for clarifications. Also, in regards to solutions, there were really helpful advices in the assignments' source-code. Sometimes all you had to do was to translate English to Scala.

by cdman 14y ago

pramode 14y ago

That's strange - I did not have any difficulty with the exercises and found them to be clearly specified! All the exercise problems were neatly broken down into small functions - you simply had to fill up the body of the functions!

bazzargh 14y ago
The exercises were not all that difficult (especially given that there were unit tests for almost all of them), but they did have issues. Some of the tests required you to use functions that didn't appear until one or two lectures later. Most likely the GP is complaining about the fact that the server-side tests were on bigger datasets than the ones that shipped with the code; but that wasn't a big issue as you could keep resubmitting up to the deadline. I found it useful to remember that almost all of the solution functions were very short; most were one line, some up to five; if you were writing long functions you're most likely doing it wrong. Similarly, the local tests should finish almost instantaneously. If they take 30s with the local dataset, they'll time out with the larger dataset on the server.

bad_user 14y ago

From my experience with the first iteration of this course and with the problems experienced by people on the course forum ... 99.99% of problems came from NOT reading the assignment. I went through all the homework and passed the course with the maximum grade. Except for the last homework where I too was guilty of the above, all submissions took the maximum grade from the first try. I don't remember encountering any confusing problem definition and even if a problem is confusing to you, there were plenty of people available on the forum and all you had to do was to ask for clarifications. Also, in regards to solutions, there were really helpful advices in the assignments' source-code. Sometimes all you had to do was to translate English to Scala.