Well, my final semester is fast approaching at UCF…amazing how fast that went.\u00a0 Filling out the intent to graduate was an interesting tidbit, it really makes you think about what you learned!\u00a0 I thought it would be a neat blog post to link to when some friends who are up and coming at UCF ask me “Which courses should I take!?!?”.<\/p>\n
Computer Science 2<\/strong> (COP3502) – I won’t even lie, I struggled in this one<\/em>.\u00a0 If you’re not a Computer Science student, stay away!\u00a0 The course is currently being taught by Ben Douglas, and focuses on algorithm analysis.\u00a0 The course starts off really easy, and after the first exam it gets incredibly hard.\u00a0 The course is designed with a recitation, and I really think that most people who fail it, do not attend.\u00a0 Ben is one of the most knowledgeable professors I’ve had at UCF, but sometimes that comes at the expense of him talking over your head in class.\u00a0 If this happens, be sure to have the TA go over it in recitation, as topics build on each other, and the tests are near impossible to guess on.\u00a0 Topics in the course include backtracking<\/a>, sorting algorithms<\/a>, brute force<\/a>, object oriented programming<\/a>, graphs<\/a>, and many more.\u00a0 All tests and assignments are Java based.\u00a0 Tests are closed notes & closed book.\u00a0 The course does not have a set grading scale, the final grades are determined by the overall class average after the final exam.<\/p>\n Digital Investigative Technologies<\/strong> (CET4885) – (Click for syllabus<\/a>) This course isn’t terribly difficult due to the fact that Dr. Philip Craiger<\/a> has really taken his time to produce a very thorough selection of course materials (no book required), but it does take a lot of your time to complete the projects.\u00a0 The course begins by teaching you how to take a digital clone of a hard drive to avoid messing up the “evidence”, and explains data collection methods to ensure that your investigation will hold up in court.\u00a0 After that, the course will teach you how to modify the access dates of files and recover deleted files in Linux by hand using only tools freely available online. Once you understand how these tools work, the course then introduces a few professional tools that you will need in order to complete the final project.\u00a0 One of the most hands on courses in the UCF Information Technology curriculum, I recommend this course to any student.\u00a0 One final word of advice…do not ask a question answered in materials already given to you, and don’t ask something that’s easy to find out with a Google search.\u00a0 Dr. Craiger really forces students to seek out answers on their own as a first option just like you will have to in the real world when you get a job.\u00a0 He’s not someone who got a PhD and never had a real job outside of teaching, so his methods are different than professors you might have had before.<\/p>\n Database Concepts<\/strong> (CGS2545) – Database Concepts is taught by Robert Koeneke, but the most useful portion of the course (the lab) has projects and slides developed by Dr. Mark Llewellyn.\u00a0 The slides teach you all of the basics on creating a Microsoft Access database, starting from modifying existing databases, creating queries, reports, new tables, and eventually developing your own database.\u00a0 The step by step instructions are great, and the pace is very good as well.\u00a0 A final project in the course is worth a large portion of your grade.\u00a0 This course is very hands on as well, and after completing it, I feel that I have the knowledge to create a database for anything that I currently have a need for.\u00a0 My only complaint is that the course spends a bit too much time on database planning, and too little time focusing on combined\/advanced queries, as these felt very rushed to get in before the final exam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, my final semester is fast approaching at UCF…amazing how fast that went.\u00a0 Filling out the intent to graduate was an interesting tidbit, it really makes you think about what you learned!\u00a0 I thought it would be a neat blog post to link to when some friends who are up and coming at UCF ask […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[149,146,147,150,148,144,145,143,141,142],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology-and-programming","tag-cet4885","tag-computer-science-2","tag-computer-science-ii","tag-cop3502","tag-cs2","tag-digital-forensics","tag-linux","tag-network-security","tag-ucf","tag-university-of-central-florida"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":745,"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions\/745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesg.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}