CST 334: Week 5

I had not yet received my overall Midterm Exam score when I started writing this post but based on my experience going through the exam problems and the initial score I received on completion shows I need to improve my understanding of the conceptual material in this class. I know I could use some more time to digest the reading material because I tend to go through it once using a read aloud feature because it helps me keep pace rather than getting stuck or distracted. Additionally, I don’t feel like there’s enough time available in my week to do the reading at a slower pace than what I do now. Therefore, I need to find a solution that will allow me to retain more or least track where certain information is so it’s easier to find. 

In addition to what I’ve learned from my experience taking the midterm, we learned about concurrency and threads. Threads allow more than one point of execution within a single program, so the program can perform multiple tasks at the same time, which is called parallelism. This is the primary reason we use threading, while the other is to avoid blocked programs due to slow I/O. For example, if a process needs to retrieve input data from an external device, instead of waiting to receive that data, the process can continue to perform other tasks, like preparing pointers to designated variables. When certain resources must be shared between tasks or one task is dependent on another, concurrency ensures tasks are executed in a coordinated fashion, which helps to prevent data corruption or miscalculations.