Last week I learned a few valuable lessons, and for once I learned them in a good way. See, typically I do not do well on Dr. Downing's exams. They tend to feed off the things I almost know and should know, but just quite can't extract from the tip of my tongue. I always do well on the projects, go up and down with the quizzes, but the tests for me are always a wildcard. This one was different...
Friday, a networks project was due, and being that I was going mountain bike racing for the weekend come lunchtime Friday, I knew things were going to get a little hectic Wednesday and Thursday. During crunch time on Thursday afternoon, I think I found the best way to study Dr. Downing's test:
Fire up the Python interpreter and just start cranking examples.
Seriously. Go through all the slides. Define functions. Define new functions. Do them backwards. Now forwards. Upside-down. Do stupid examples, even things that you would normally think to be common sense because come test time, you very well might not know slight pythonic nuances simply because you've never dealt with them yourself. It's one thing to see things done for you in class, it's another thing to do them yourself. I'll say it again:
It's one thing to see things done for you in class, it's another thing to do them yourself.
Also, be a good boy and do the reading. Dr. Downing's readings are extremely helpful and respectably applicable to the real world. Not only will they help you become a more understanding programmer, but they most certainly will also score you a couple test answers.
This was probably the first test I've felt comfortable with, and it's simply from running through examples myself instead of just looking at them. Cheers!
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