CST370: Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Week 1

Week 1

A lot of this week's material felt like a review of concepts I learned in Data Structures with Mrs. E at Orange Coast College. We went back over things like vectors, lists, stacks, queues, sets, maps, trees, and graphs, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much of it came back to me.

I was especially proud of myself for being able to parse through the coding examples and understand what was happening without feeling completely lost. I know I'm a CS major and I even have a certificate in C++, but I still feel like sometimes I'm five steps behind at the beginning of coding-heavy courses. Some semesters have little to no coding, so by the time I come back to it, I feel a little rusty. If you don't use it, you lose it, amirite? 

I also liked realizing that some of the basics came back pretty quickly. While revieing the lecture coding examples I remembered that a queue is FIFO, while a stack is LIFO. Working through the lecture and PowerPoint exercises helped reinforce those concepts and gave me a little more confidence as the week went on. 

We also started to look at time and space efficiency, time complexity, basic operations, and best- and worst- case efficiency. 

Overall. this week was a good refresher and a pretty encouraging way to start the course. I know the material will get more difficult, but it was nice to start out feeling confident.