university

Since some people are interested in my studies at TU-Berlin, this semester finally is ove, I have to write my first test in a week and my last at the beginning of August I will give a short summary of what we did this semester.

I mainly had 4 courses this semester: computer science, theoretical computer sciense, technical computer sciense and math + special UNIX-course.
I will not write about math cause its boring enough that I need to do this



Computer science:
First we had to learn the Java programming language. That was really boring but
it seems to be normal to teach this language at universities.
The next thing we learned was really interesting. We basically computed time an space complexity of code we wrote and famous code snippets.

Then we did the most terrible thing of the whole semester, Hoare logic. Hoare logic is used to evidence the correctness and termination of a piece of code using methods of mathematics. This really sucked and almost all students I know had big problems with this.
Also very interesting but mostly no new information for me were the studies of different sorting and search methods and their implementation.
Working with Heaps for example was pretty much fun.
At the end we did some assembly programming and theoretical stuff about processor design.

Theoretical computer science
This course is also one of my favorites but its also one of the difficult ones. The topics are usually not too difficult but there are masses of corner and special cases. The first part of the lectures was about set theory (sets, relations, orders, maps, quotient sets).
It would be too much detail to explain this here.
The second part was mainly about data structures and about the differences between semantik and syntax. This sounds very easy but can be very complex especially evidences with complex Homomorphisms.
Regarding to the design of computer languages this course is fairly important.

Technical computer science
This was also very interesting but also very disturbing because of the tools we had to use.
We first used Spice a diploma work of a student and a big piece of stinky shit to draw up circuit diagrams for different problems. The second pieceofshit^Wtool we used was Diglog from Berkeley to draw up a bit more complex circuits. For example the design of n-bit ALUs. The cool thing here is that there is no written test, you just need to pass the homeworks.
After visiting this course in combination with computer science I think most of my fellow students understand how a Computer (here a CPU) works in detail.

Special UNIX course
Of course this was my favorite course this time.
It teaches you the principles of UNIX systems including modern systems like linux.
Homeworks include writing a simple shell, compression (zlib) enabled webserver, du(1) clone in C.