My experience taking OOP has been unique and immersive. As a whole, I really enjoyed the course. I felt that I learned important skills in C++ and object oriented programming that I could carry with me to my job and in my future projects. Each project, I learned something new. From making objects which knew nearly nothing about how each other worked, to understanding how allocation works, to making decisions about using an lazy or eager caches, I feel like I can confidently say that I took a lot from the projects. One of the hardest parts of the class was having the time for the readings. Even without taking a full semester, my classes kept me so busy that it was difficult to fit the readings in. However, overall, I wish I had made the time for them more because you will definitely need them for the quizzes and to develop a basic understanding of many of the topics we cover in class.

Piazza is also a great place for this class to chat about topics we covered and issues you could be having with your projects. It was definitely the go-to for all questions.

One of the most important lessons I think I learned from this class is the value of starting early. It is much easier to fully soak something in if you aren’t worried about your deadline the whole time. You can overcome any initial setup challenges early on and then move on to the meat of it. I recommend doing that if you want to do well on the projects! The final important lesson learned is to test your code as you go. I can compare and contrast - one project I wrote tests at the end and it was no fun AND we risked learning towards the end that our code had a major flaw. Other project we did the tests as we went and it allowed for a smoother submission process on the final day. Testing as you go helps you make better design decisions and ensure your code is doing exactly what you want it to do before you go and use it elsewhere. One piece of advice one of my mentors has given me is “Write code and make design decisions which allow you to test your code easily,” and that has stuck with me ever since.

I definitely recommend this class :)