Container Classes

IRC meetings have become so slow that Fardad Soleimanloo has now decided to try using voice conferences through Skype! Though OOP344 is not an open source course (like OSD600), the project for it sure is starting to look and work like one. (Just this morning I had to chuckle at my team--scheduling a meeting that works with everyone's schedules is a nightmare.) I find the course incredible because in all my years of studying, I've never seen a teacher put so much time into a course or students asked to put so much into it either. In university for Economics, I mastered the art of cramming for every midterm and test (those were all you were getting marked on, after all). I studied strategically and aced most of them, but I didn't retain much info in the end. I'm finding that in college, with weekly due dates for each course, you have to keep at it or fall behind if you let things slide even by a week.

Anyway, the real point of this post was to share a couple of nifty little webpages about container classes. In our last IRC meeting, my group had a bouncy, yellow question mark over our collective heads because we just didn't grasp the idea of them soon enough. But the fact is, container classes really are how Fardad described: they are an array (another kind of container) for objects. Here is the webpage, complete with a sample class, from learncpp.com. I haven't read this one from parashift.com yet, but the writing seemed pretty funny, especially after learning the basics of a container class.

I haven't read the textbook section for stacks and queues yet (and yes, that means I haven't coded how a queue works yet, either), but the above webpages really helped me understand the basic idea for them. I hope they help someone else, too.