CSE 160 - HW4 - Advice from 14wi students:

"What do you wish you had known before you started?  What
would you do differently?  What advice would you offer
to future students?"

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Do  the homework early, think logically 

This is a very long assignment. I didn't feel that I knew enough about sets, graphs or dictionaries beforehand, but lecture notes saved me!
Advice: write it out

The assigned readings and lectures were sufficient to address the concepts in this assignment. My advice would be to allow ample time for the assignment, since it involves a lot of practice of those concepts, and a lot of thinking about how the functions interact.


Start early. This assignment took way longer than I expected, which only hurt me in the long run.

Draw things out!! it will be much more helpful to see visuals in solving the problem 

None. This was a really fun homework assignment with a great real world application! 

I'm not sure there is any piece of knowledge I was missing before I started most of what I learned I learned through working though the problems, However I would offer the advice that planning out your functions on paper is incredibly helpful.
Usually I would make a list of what the function needed to have input, what it should output (specifically what type(list, dictionary . . .)) and what I data structures I would need to create this output

I wish i was more familiar with sets and dictionaries

Save work constantly incase the computer crashes.

I would have definitely started earlier, and re-read the past chapters on sorting and dictionaries. 

I definitely should have started earlier.

I wish I knew this homework is harder than previous assignments and I should start earlier

It took me forever even though I enjoyed it very much. I would advice to start early because the file is so big, it takes forever for computer to run it. 

With this assignment, I would advice other students to be aware of the given functions and operators at your disposal. Using some of the slides and the internet to quickly find what your looking for (if it is trying to remember how some built-in functions work) is very helpful.

I had tech problems with the installation that kind of screwed up this assignment - I couldn't start until Friday morning.  I guess just making sure the installation is actually right.