UMUC: Classes Review

I want to give a run-down on each of the classes I've taken at UMUC. My degree is in cybersecurity and software development, and I've taken three classes total. Keep in mind the classes are 8-weeks long, and usually consists of 4 projects, 4 discussion posts, and any number of quizzes/tests. 

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I took my first class in Spring; it was a prerequisite coding course titled CMIS 102. It went over coding basics using C.

Class: CMIS 102, Professor Goode

Pros:The class teaches important coding fundamentals. 

Cons: I felt this particular teacher had confusing notes for his lessons. Each week he would post a much more 'helpful' lesson himself. Having taken 2 more classes, his notes were definitely confusing, but I was also a noob at programming. Like all the teachers, he would meet on Skype if you asked him to. 

Most Difficult and/or Important Concept Learned: I learned the very important basics of coding. Almost every concept in this class was fairly easy to learn up until arrays and for loops. 1D, 2D, and 3D arrays and for loops were the most difficult concept for me.

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Class: CMIS 141, Professor Pitocco- JAVA

Pros: I really appreciate the teacher's involvement, and I appreciate timeliness with which he grades your assignments. Definitely an example of good teaching on an online platform.

Cons: His first two tests are difficult and not the kind of knowledge you could study for as the notes were ginormous. I'd suggest taking the test once at the beginning of the week, doing the week's work and take notes, and then taking the test again at the end of the week (you are allow two attempts). 

Most Difficult and/or Important Concept Learned: I learned a lot of JAVA fundamentals in this course. I'd say some concepts that were *cough* fun to wrap my head around:

-creating an instance of an object using a constructor in another java file.

-creating and calling on methods

-nesting code...IE:  toString(myNumber(input.keyboard)));

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Class: CMIS 320, Professor - SQL, ORACLE, SQLITE

Pros: Like CMIS 141, I really struck gold again within another great professor. He grades quick, is always willing to answer questions, and his notes weren't terribly difficult to follow. 

Cons: The fact that I used a Macbook Pro made this class a little more difficult. We had to connect to UMUC's servers and the instructions for Macs were less clear. It seems Windows is preferred at UMUC. 

Most Difficult and/or Important Concept Learned: 

SQL itself is easy to learn and implement. I had a lot of fun on the terminal with Sqlite on my mac. I'd say a difficult aspect of this class was learning the normalization forms. 1NF, 2NF, and 3NF can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around at first. The final project is centered on the concept.

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This Fall I'm taking CMIS 242 (Intermediate Java), and cmis 350 (Database Security). I'm very excited to continue this coding journey!!!