Comments: Recursion and Testing.

        This last week was largely comprised of exposing us to lots and lots of recursion examples. That being said we don't get much of a chance to interact with them.

        Yes the code is available to us on the course webpage.

        What I'm getting at is seeing recursion being used to solve problems is different than having recursion in your tool box, attempting a problem, and ultimately realizing recursion is a viable path to a solution.I think it would be more effective if we'd be given some very easy practice problems to warm up with and get a sense of the technique of recursion. Instead of merely seeing solutions of problems using recursion and then be expected to implement a rather difficult one on a our assignment this week.

        To get a sense of the technique is particularly what I've sought out to do recently and after scouring the internet you find some useful tips. You want to break the function down into two parts (for a simple problem) in which either the argument falls into the category of the base case(s) or that it must be reduced to the base case by simply following the pattern. In a later week for the class I will have to publish a post dedicated specifically to recursion so I'll end things here.

        I'd rather be coding (this is actually with respect to the lectures) but if I'm going to sit in a lecture hall for two hours watching a power point presentation I'd rather the lecture systematically describing how I should go about implementing these techniques (especially if they're new) than just show us lots of examples with no preface.

        OK, I've reached my complaint-quota for the week.

        Aside from recursion, unittest became much more interesting. In lab we utilized the fact that since tests are considered classes they can be the subject of inheritance. The only caveat is that the ability to reuse a particular test usually means that it is very general in nature, although, anything that reduces duplicate code is almost always warranted. Also the setUp and tearDown methods are great. No really -  why they weren't covered in the prerequisite course where we often did create unittest files is mind boggling.