As I said before, there will be no specific help in the last
day before the submission deadline. Those who chronically start late and find
out that they still have some errors or the programs do not work as intended in the
last day will get low effort/merit grades in the course and run the risk of not
completing the tasks despite my repeated advice to start early.
The main work in
programming is in finding errors and making the code work – this is what you
are getting your points for. Do not assume that what you write should
immediately work and if it doesn’t -
then something extraordinary happens. The code normally results in errors and the programmer has to debug it.
Here is general advice as help for the last day: In this course
programming is largely simplified (compared to the Java course) by the methodology
where you are getting working
snippets of code or whole programs and just have to “personalize” them. It
means that most of the time if you get a syntax error message or the code doesn’t
work – the error might be only in a handful
of statements where you ”plug” YOUR OWN information. In this week’s case: DEFINE statements, the table creation
statement, and INSERT statements. This is what you should check for errors,
compare the syntax (commas, semicolons, quotation marks, etc.) with my examples
and syntax explanation from the textbook. Read all posts in Q&A since they
are for all students.
Those who start early and run into errors that they cannot
see, usually get general advice in Q&A (please do not show code and ask other students to debug it for you). You also get specific help from me (showing where the error is but, still,
without me correcting it for you – otherwise I cannot give you points for
debugging) as many students do. The late starters run high risk of not having working programs and
getting zero points for not bneing able to debug the handful of statements with personalized
code. They also run the risk of failing the following week’s tasks since they
usually are based on the previous weeks (like in week 9 the possibility of
getting fields from the form and storing them in the variables of PHP that then
will be used in the INSERT statements for user-supplied information – is based
on the work of week 8 and READING recommended material from the textbook on how
the variables (not the constants!) are plugged into PHP/SQL statements).
Those who will not be able to complete the work by debugging
the errors should email me their godaddy login info along with database login
info if they want me to show were the problem was. If it has been done in the last day - I will still show you were exactly your
errors are (but only after the deadline is over and you are graded), so that it
will not affect the following week. If you do not read the textbook and
recommended Web material - you will
still run high risk of not being able to understand how to use the previous week
in the next week’s tasks and your project – so re-read the material to really
understand how it all works (not just copying my code).
Please realize that despite the fact that you can be getting
much more help in this online course than in classroom settings, since I am available 7 days a week
and can closely work individually with your problems offering advice and help
in programming (what a number of
students successfully use), the lack of desire to apply yourselves by starting
early and spending enough time on reading the recommended material, which explains
the meaning of every statement and used techniques, might lead to poor results
in the course. Very little time is left in this course to correct your mode of
work and show good effort. Use it!
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