Busy Teaching Summer Session

You may have noticed the number of posts dropping off significantly in the last two weeks. The reason is that I am teaching a summer session course and that's always a very intense experience for all involved, students as well as teachers.

Last year I was even busier because I wrote detailed lecture notes. This year I am busy because I am converting the lecture notes into a PDF document that will hopefully turn into something useful eventually. I still have a ways to go, for example I'll have to replace a lot of "ASCII-graphics" with real images sooner or later, but it's a surprisingly fun process.

The "manuscript" is at about 200 pages right now, but that's including a lot of "hacking discussions" that a "stuffy text book" would not really talk about. Of course the notes are also missing a lot that a "stuffy text book" would have, detailed proofs for example. It's a trade-off!

I hope that eventually all of this will turn into a fairly concise "primer on data structures," something a lot shorter than a "real" text book but approximately just as useful if it is supplemented with decent lectures.

In any case, I have three more weeks of summer session ahead of me and during that time I expect very few blog posts to actually come to fruition. After that I'll probably be in Germany for a week or two, so in the end I'll only have two more "productive blogging weeks" before the next semester starts. Oh well.