🕘 Week 9: Storing and Retrieving Data from Files

Dear all,

We hope you all had a great week! With one week left, we hope that you are all looking forward to taking your knowledge to the next level!

• The slides and class recordings as well as the videos from the class and lab sections are posted on Gauchospace. There were just a few questions during the review session and they mostly revolved around the quiz 6, so we didn’t post a video.

⏰ Week 10 - Due dates and Deadlines ⏰

In the previous announcement (emailed on email on Wednesday, March 8), we extended Week 08 and 09 lab deadlines.

• To ensure that everyone has a chance to work through the Grade Management labs and submit them, we will extend the LA08 deadline until ⏰ this Saturday (March 11) 23:59.
• Week 10 Labs have been released, so you can start working on them already.

The deadlines next week are:

• ⏰ Wednesday, 3/15 11:59PM: Project Checkpoint 1
• ⏰ Saturday, 3/18 11:59PM: LA09 functions are needed for the Project Checkpoint 2, so they will be due in zyBooks at that time as well: at the end of Week 10.
• ⏰ Saturday, 3/18 11:59PM: PA10 + CA10

Finals Week

⏰ Final Project Submission and LA10 are due Fri, Mar 24, 23:59.

Final Project Clarification

• As mentioned in this piazza post, to pass the Gradescope tests for final project (checkpoint 1), you need to add two dash lines (each composed of 42 dashes ‘-‘) in your print_restaurant_menu function. We apologize for the inconsistency.

🔮 Looking ahead to Week 10

• Start working on the final project! The final project will require more work and is more complex than our regular labs, so it is important to start early. It is similar in difficulty to the Week 08 project.
• Don’t panic when your code doesn’t behave as expected. It is normal to spend a lot of time debugging the program. Reading the error carefully and using print statements can greatly reduce debugging time.
• Testing is important. Fully test your program to make sure your code handles different edge cases. It is always a good practice to start from testing each function, and then test the whole program comprehensively.
• When testing, write different tests to check different cases: it is redundant to check the same case multiple times, so make sure that your tests cover the various branches in your code.
• Besides the final project, you will work with recursion next week, which is a very powerful concept. There is a video and a reference handout that’s linked on Gauchospace under Week 10 - we recommend watching it first before reading zyBooks Week 10 content.

ESCI Survey Reminder

• You should all received an email about the ESCI survey. To submit the feedback, please log in to https://esci.id.ucsb.edu using your UCSBNetID and password. Your responses there are anonymous but your thoughtful and constructive feedback will help us improve the course and methods of instruction. The form takes ~6 minutes to complete, so please complete it as soon as possible.

➡️ Resources

Here is an interesting article talking about csv files that we leared how to read this week: CSV FORMAT: HISTORY, ADVANTAGES AND WHY IT IS STILL POPULAR.

We are happy to see that you are working hard and making your way through the difficult weeks of the quarter. Let’s keep the spirit up. We are here to help you with anything you need – don’t hesitate to reach out to us through Piazza or attend our office hours during the week (including the in-person times! 🎊).

Wishing you all a lovely weekend!

Prof K and the mentors