Monica's CS Journey

This week, I learned about the C programming language. Throughout my programming journey, my classes predominantly involved the use of Java and C++. I always thought C would be fairly similar to C++, but I see now it is preferred for better control, as it allows for low-level access, allowing for direct memory manipulation. This can be seen by the ability to allocate memory dynamically through the use of the  malloc function. It is also different in the fact that it does not have built in boolean types, so false is simply expressed as '0'. However, it also has the capabilities to use pointers, like C++, which accesses the original object and are locations in memory. Although it does not have object-oriented programming abilities, it seems to place create emphasis on structs to store different data types together to make another usable type. It just doesn't create any other functions associated with it like Java. It requires caution when using, since everything created is pu...

Briefly summarize the what you consider to be the three (3) most important things you learned in this course.  The importance of Mapping when trying to establish a UI with MongoDB and Java. During the debugging process of Lab 21, the Pharmacy database, my teammates and I kept ended up on a "white label error" page. A lot of the times, we realized that our controller was only mapped to "POST". We had to comb through a lot of the classes we edited and the html files to make sure it was correct. Learning about MongoDB was a huge learning curve. It seemed like we spent so much time to MySQL then all of a sudden was a quick change in so little time. It was difficult to understand how to write the scripts using Power Shell and understanding how we created the script to communicate with Java. However, once we figured that out, it was amazing to watch the executions unfold. I also consider it really important because two weeks before learning about Mongo, I was having issue...

Compare MongoDB with MySQL.  What are some similarities?  Both MongoDB and MySQL are both databases that stores a collection of data that can be created, read, updated, and deleted. MongoDB can also represent the type of information, like integer, string, double, date, boolean, etc. Just like MySQL, it has indexing abilities and offers security with role-based access, authentication, and authorization. What are some differences?  The difference between MongoDB and MySQL is that MongoDB is a document-based style of collection whereas MySQL is a relational database. This means that it stores data objects as documents inside a collection as a binary JSON. As a result, the language style differs as well. MongoDB was also developed with the intention of scalability at the forefront of their mind. When would you choose one over the other?    If queries have more simple data types that can be adhered to, MySQL might be a good candidate, as MongoDB supports more complex...

Summarize what you have learned this week.  This week, I learned that programming language tends to be categorized between being imperative or declarative. In imperative language, the statement flows are controlled so they are executed in a specific order. On the other hand, declarative language lacks this controlled flow because the statement declares the desired result. Declarative language tends to be the choice for database queries due to the ease of programming and time to execute the queries. I also learned that SQL statements can be embedded in the host language of the program where it then gets translated by the pre-compiler. This will require that the programs are connected to a database prior to executing queries, which allows the database to be accessed. The same can be done vice versa, where the host language can be utilized in SQL statements when declared between 'BEGIN DECLARE SECTION' and 'END DECLARE SECTION'. As a result, it is possible to create databa...