CST 205 - Week 7

Lab 15 - 17

After adding the finishing touches to our Final, Brad and I began work on Labs 15 and 16, while I finished Lab 17.

Lab 15 was a 2 part assignment meant to familiarize us with using the Python Standard Library. The first part was to create a standard game of Craps using the "random" module, to simulate rolling two dies. I have already made a variation of this game in a previous class in Java, but this was still a good review. It was nice to see a general improvement in my programming since the last time I made this program a few years ago, it was a 2 day-endeavor compared to this time which took less than an hour with some help.
The second part was a straightforward problem that required us to use the calendar module to fetch and print dates from the month we were born and the day of the week that the Declaration of Independence was signed. The hardest part of this assignment was trying to get the Python 3 functionalities to work with JES (Python 2) and print the results in a readable way.

Lab 16 had us use the urllib module to open up a current URL, take at least 10 pieces of information from the site, write that to an HTML file, and display it on a site. Brad already had a function from a previous lab that effectively found text through a line by line search, but the hardest part was customizing it to give us the exact text we wanted. We eventually took the result of his function and searched through that text again to get the exact block of text that we were looking for.

Lab 17 combined the results from the Green Eggs and Ham unique word counter Lab and combined it with writing text to an HTML file. The result was the first step in a "Word Cloud" program that can take in a txt file, count the unique words in the file and discrete uses of each word. The program then takes that information to display each individual word in css and changes the size and color of the text depending on how many times it is used in the file.

CST 205

This class has been an excellent way for me to get back into the practice or programming regularly. It reintriduced programming concepts in an engaging way that I was able to see the effects of right away. Halfway through the course I was inspired to use the image manipulation skills I've learned in this class to try and make some sort of visual art add-on. Once I have a lot more practice under my belt, adding on to programs like Adobe Illustrator or GIMP would be a very fun and challanging way to use these skills.