Snozberry

So, after MANY, MANY.... MANY hours, I just finished my first C++ program. I'm not perfectly satisfied with my work. I don't think I wrote the cleanest code in the world, in fact:

• There are some functions I would re-code if given the time
• I haven't learned the details of how best to organize my code into header & source files
• I still am not good at planning which functions I'll need and whether class members should be public, or private
• I need to learn more about namespaces and other object-oriented methods

...BUT, as far as I can tell what is there does the job with absolutely zero errors.

The program is designed to manipulate polynomials. I didn't quite finish everything (I spent too much time making a generic templated linked list class and then deriving my polynomial class from that), but I was happy enough to hand it in. I taught myself a TON over the past two weeks and I'm feeling much more comfortable with the basics than I was before. That's not to say I feel confident like I do in Perl, just that I'm picking things up. I can't say how frustrating it is to have a professor and TA who do not reply to your emails and are generally not good teachers.

I really just want to take a good CS course, so that someone can tell me how I need to approach these problems. Give me the tools and I'll solve problems for a lifetime. Show me C++ by stupid little examples and I'll never be able to code even a simple polynomial manipulation engine. Okay, I haven't slept much in the past two days, I'm going to continue this story later.