Good education prog. for beginners in C and programming overall
Relatively thorough overview of language fundamentals and OOP fundamentals. Would like to see coverage of smart pointers and parallel programming.
This course was really well organized, challenged the brain, and overall provided a good learning experience.
Theory: For the later courses, generally from 2.4 onwards I feel, there isn't enough theory. Perhaps a few more steps detailing a few things (such as how lists work for course 2.8, or a short detailing of class relationships at 2.4) could really be beneficial for the student. Exercises (general): - You have some tests which are a little bit hard to understand. Personally I only really got stuck at one exercise as I couldn't understand what one of the tests wanted from me (I think it was one with a binary tree and for input we had two of the same integer?), but I've seen comments from other students complaining about this. Perhaps it'd be best to include some section with a spoiler alert for what the tests include. This way, students can still try to figure out what the weaknesses in their code are, but if it becomes frustrating, they can look it up. - I don't know if this is a nitpick or not, but too many exercises rely on each other. Some exercises require code from other courses, even! That's a bit too much dependency on earlier exercises. A good start would be to reduce this to happening only in the same course (for example, I don't have to take the code from 2.3 into 2.4). Exercises (particular): - 1.1, step 8: result has to be in a certain order. Can be confusing as to why answer is not correct, but understandable if we want more readable input. - 1.1, step 14: initially, there was a problem which resulted in us having to write Python code, not C code. It was resolved, but I don't know if temporarily or permanently, so I'm just giving a heads-up. - 2.2, step 13: a chore of an exercise. First, we need to change the two rep() functions to set() and get() (keep some consistency. If you want to show that functions can be overloaded, then use one-two exercises. Even then, it makes the code difficult to read when your two rep() functions do completely different things and is not good practice, I'd assume.). Second, having to pull up a different page just so I can check the tests is a little bit annoying. And this isn't really your fault, but Stepik really doesn't do a good job with helping you debug. There are a lot of traps in this exercise, so a separate IDE capable of debugging is heavily recommended. - 2.3, step 4: requires code from 2.2. - 2.4, steps 2, 3 and 4: require theory which is nowhere to be seen. This is a huge problem for step 4, mostly. - 2.4, steps 6 and 7: so much code to write (I reached into the 2-3 hundreds), they both require code from 2.2. These, alongside 2.2, step 13, are probably the worst exercises. While that is mostly due to Stepik, you must consider that not everyone has an IDE and knowledge of how to properly debug, something that I don't remember seeing taught in any course. I for one managed to do these two without an IDE, just to see how it would be. Truthfully, it was painstaking and annoying. - 2.5, step 10: a behemoth of an exercise, requiring code from exercises which already require prior code, couple that with the necessary theory which isn't given and you have a mess of an exercise. This is, by far, the worst exercise and would gladly have it outright removed. - 2.6: no code to write? Exception handling is an important concept, so I would've assumed some coding exercises were in order, but it seems I was wrong. Do try to include at least one or two such exercises here in the future. But please, without any need for code from prior exercises. Nitpicks: - Just for convenience, you might as well include that we should copy the current code, as we will have to use it in the next exercise. - I hope there won't be more comments like Mr. Pop's "Well, most of the important things in life don't come with clear specifications and you will need to figure it out by yourself. This is part of learning process, and sometimes, can be painful.". This simply feels like an excuse for not giving clear specifications. Yes, often in life we don't get clear specifications, but that is why we inquire further clarification of the problem at hand. That comment is heavily disliked for a reason. Overall, not a bad course, some improvements could be made to make the tedious exercises more interesting and some aspects could be further explained a bit better (how you want the output to look, what the tests include etc). A bit more variety in the exercises would also be welcomed, far too many of them rely on code from prior exercises.