Insufficiently Random

I passed two of the five qualifying exams required for a PhD in Computer Science. Go me! Now I just have three of them left. I’m taking one as a course this semester and the other two will just have to wait until August when the oral exams are offered again. I opted to put those exams off so that I could spend more time studying, as I will only get one attempt to pass them.

I’m taking a course this semester on computer network security. One of our texts is Bruce Schneier’s Applied Cryptography. The campus bookstore wants $51 for this book in paperback. Searching by the ISBN on Amazon came up with a price of $31.80 for the paperback edition. A savings of $19.20, roughly equal to the cost of 4 lunches on campus. Reason number 1 not to purchase your books on campus.

Schneier (wisely I would say) offers links to his books on Amazon through the Amazon referral program. Except that the hardcover edition link is currently jumping to the paperback edition and is listing at full price ($60.00) while the paperback link is listing for $31.80.

Apparently Amazon doesn’t have hardcover editions available and is instead offering the paperback edition at full price, hoping that you won’t notice since you might be willing to pay more. If I’m going to pay more for a book I want something in return, such as a hardcover. I would rather have the hardcover version of good books like Applied Cryptography as hardcovers tend to last longer around me than paperback covers do.

I took RPI’s “Programming Languages” course in the spring of 1999. It was the end of my second year at RPI. The course was supposed to teach us about important concepts in programming languages as well as introduce us to different genres of programming, such as OOP, generic, functional, logic, etc.
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What is the practical importance of The Pict Programming Language? Because I have an exam next week which might be asking me exactly that.
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I just finished reading one of Joel’s latest: The Perils of JavaSchools. He’s right.

I’m not a graduate of a Java school, but I am a graduate of a C++ school. Where C++’s STL library is taught before dynamic memory allocation. Or recursion. Or data structures of any type.

By the time students actually get to the data structures course they have been writing all of their assignments with std::vector and std::map. They don’t understand how generic types work, but they can use them to implement a very poor spell checker. They have no desire to learn how std::map might be implemented, as they think that all they really need to know is #include <map>. It might as well be Java, where at least they have to deal with the challenge of downcasting when accessing a java.lang.Map.
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