Week 9: Binary Search Tree and Big-O (Late Post)

I apologize for the lateness of this post. Usually this post would have been handed in on Friday, March 14, 2014, but due to travel and WiFi connectivity problems, I am posting last weeks response now. During last weeks lectures, Danny talked about Binary Search Trees and Big-O run times. Both of these lectures reminded me of my CSC165 class I had in first semester. I did have trouble with the Big-O notation from the CSC165 class considering that we were not coding but actually trying to prove it on paper. It's relieving to hear that it won't be necessarily required of me to do that. Thanks to Danny, he was able to re-iterate some of the characteristics of the Big-O and refresh my memory of what it is. Furthermore, when it comes to Binary Search Trees, using both insertion sort and selection sort, he was able to show me the differences of the two sorting methods effectively using the playing cards and the projector. I find the concept of searching through a Binary Tree easy considering that if you are searching for a number less than the root, you can ignore the right sub-tree and recursively call the same function on the left sub-tree to find the number you are looking for. In conclusion, Week 9 for me was like a refresher week from CSC165 and a helpful reminder for the different kinds of sorting. Thanks to Danny, I have gained a better understanding of these concepts and I hope they can benefit me more effectively throughout the next coming weeks.

LinkedList, Binary Trees, and Test

During this week, a lot has happened in CSC148. in the lectures, Danny talked a little bit more about Linked Lists, and he began to teach us about Binary Trees. During Mondays lecture, he taught us the two different ways to think of Linked Lists. The first way is to think of it as a list made up of an item and then the remaining list. The other way to think about it is an object with a value with a reference to other objects. These two different ways of thinking helped me get a better idea of what Linked Lists are. On Wednesday, Danny gave us back our test marks and taught us a bit about Binary Trees. I find the concept behind Binary Trees to be a little simple since its just a tree with the left node less than the root and the right node greater than the root. Furthermore, I got a 79% on the first term test which in my opinion is a good mark. I could have done better if I had reviewed Trees a bit more but a 79% is good nonetheless.