computer architecture/C952 - fun, but somewhat of a challenge
yet another adventure embarked upon; the goblin dives into the microscopic world of computers, a TRON-esque landscape, where things are truly, one or the other.
I believe I’ll follow the format of my Discrete Math II/C960 post that I shared recently, but add on my actual learning experiences (and not just reviewing). Perhaps it would be a nice way to reflect back on my time during the course.
I’d started this class on the third of January but I only started to write about it a few days later. The first day was just to take a quick look at the book, so I wouldn’t say that counted. I read the introduction and that was it. The next day, I read the next two chapters.
Post-Course Musings
That test, I must say, definitely is lots of trivia. But for most questions if you looked at the book enough, some of the specific things may present itself to you as easy. You might look at the acronyms for the instruction, and see ones you may’ve not seen before. But, should you try to figure out what it means, you can definitely narrow it down.
I was quite shocked upon seeing this. I made plenty of educated guesses. Educated guesses are still guesses. Perhaps I rode a stroke of luck today. Or maybe I bent my mind enough to reason through the questions I didn’t know the answer to at first glance. Sometimes, you have to simply dive in and try to work the problem backwards to see which answers would in even the smallest probability, make sense.
The lessons from Discrete Math II ring true. Go steady with answering. Skip if you don’t know and then come back. If something seems too difficult, reason it out the best you can, narrowing it down to two choices and taking a chance with one of them. Don’t stress about making your score as high as possible especially if you think you may guess on many. Be confident with enough questions (I look at how far the pass threshold is to calculate a pass percentage, and then add 5-10% for “padding”) that’ll get you by to pass.
This course took about 10 days. I did not study the first day (rather, I planned out my readings). I studied a little every day. This is the sort of class where you have to let the knowledge seep in over time.
Study Log
2023.01.06 - Friday
The material so far has been not too overwhelming to understand (I am on the Processor chapter). As of today, I’m on the fifth unit of this interactive book. The zyBook is simply an interactive version of Patterson and Hennessy’s Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, ARM® Edition. Instructors and students alike both say that for the sake of the course, it is unnecessary to delve as deep as the book goes; as long as you have a comprehensive high-level understanding of the system software interaction with the hardware, and how to perform simple calculations, I think you can pass the class.
In other words: most of the book is going to be skipped. But if you’re very interested in this topic, the book would be a nice starting point if you eventually want to self-study it.
There are lots of wonderful diagrams, but I think for the course, I don’t need to memorize them all that much. But they’re helpful in visualizing how the components work. It helps solidify the things I write into my notes. I take a screenshot and then paste it in, writing a caption with it.
Later now, almost two hours after creating this post, I am almost done with the chapter. I am actually curious to know how these bits and pieces work. Perhaps I’ll keep it in mind to research later.
This chapter was interesting, at least at a high level. I think supplemented with video and perhaps a mentor’s aid, the book as a whole would be fun to go through.
2023.01.11 - Wednesday
Well, as you can see, I did not do the best with actually logging everything.
Yesterday I took the preassessment and found myself scratching my head at many of the questions. I believe I didn’t commit the vocabulary to memory enough, so it was difficult. I surprisingly did okay on the computational/assembly instruction bits. And as I mentioned above, I was surprised with my lack of success on the vocabulary portion.
So, right now, I’m trying to create a high-level mind map of the concepts and how they all relate to each other. There are “eight great ideas” the book often refers to, so I’ve been drawing lines to the ways that they relate to the topics in the book, and in between the ideas themselves.
I then went through the preassessment to take a look at the questions that I got incorrect. Plenty of those were simply things I could not recall. It’s very… trivia-heavy, so to say. For almost of the rest of the questions, they were actually simple in hindsight, but testing anxiety sometimes hits you too hard. But after doing some Quizlet and checking some of the sections, I think I’ve engrained it better into my head.
2023.01.12 - Thursday
I’ve decided to take the test tomorrow afternoon, on the 13th of January. I’m much more comfortable now. Currently reviewing the vocabulary and the summaries for each chapter. Again, there are plenty of trivia style questions on there that are pulled from rather obscure places of the textbook, but it pays to put forth your best effort on the questions you can answer.
So, whatever happens tomorrow, happens! As we say, “it is what it is”. I may get the actual textbook for this course down the road, to go back to really study and have an understanding. I believe studying computer science is helping me foster a love for math, something I honestly had trouble with since I started subtracting (I have a faded memory of my teacher helping me, I believe in 2nd grade, with multidigit subtraction because I didn’t understand how to carry, haha).
I’ll put a link here to the Teach Yourself Computer Science website, which I hope to follow in the future for fun, among my many different hobbies:
That is all for now, folks. I’ll move onto C175 (Database Management - Foundations) soon, I hope. It is the weekend, so I don’t know how fast people will respond. I’ll just check out what course materials I can until it gets unlocked.
Until then, y’all have a great day.
~ The Goblin