First time with C++. Any general advise you would like to give?

[Pavlos Sakoglou]

Hi everyone! I am Pavlos, a Business Administration graduate with some prior programming experience, but nothing serious. I am familiar with the main concepts and objectives of programming, but other than that, this is my first real attempt.
Of course my goal is to achieve admission to the MFE program, so here I am!
For those who took this online course before, what advise would you give to all of us who are first-timers here?
I think your experiences would help us get in the spirit of this community a little bit faster!!
thanks!
@APalley

 

[Justine Morgan]

Hi everyone! I am Pavlos, a Business Administration graduate with some prior programming experience, but nothing serious. I am familiar with the main concepts and objectives of programming, but other than that, this is my first real attempt.
Of course my goal is to achieve admission to the MFE program, so here I am!
For those who took this online course before, what advise would you give to all of us who are first-timers here?
I think your experiences would help us get in the spirit of this community a little bit faster!!
thanks!

Hi Pavlos!
Welcome to the course.. I took this course last year and was pretty much in the same situation - a little bit of Java but otherwise no real programming background. I think you will learn a lot from the course - its quite demanding because there is a lot of material to learn at every level, but so long as you take the time to watch the lectures and do the exercises, you will get a good grasp of C++ in general and taste of how it can be used for financial engineering!

My advice for you is that when you are taking the course, use as many resources as you can to make sure you really understand what you are doing and how you implement the code in many different situations (rather than just how to complete the exercises). I used to use a few websites such as:

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language
http://stackoverflow.com

Often you will find others have encountered similar problems! However, before doing this I would first checkout this forum - there are already a lot of existing threads with discussions about how to approach the homework exercises (and I found this super useful since other people's problems would often highlight issues I'd overlooked) and if you still can't find help for your particular issue, just ask and somebody will be happy to answer!!

But most of all, my best advice is EXPERIMENT!! The more you play around with the code, the better you will be at writing, understanding and debugging code!!

Good luck and enjoy the course :D