I’ve been working my way through Chris Pine’s Learning to Program:

It’s a great book, though it’s taking me longer than I expected to work my way through it. There are exercises at the end of each chapter and a couple of them have taken me several days to work through. Most recently I was stuck on one for almost a week. I mention this in the context of my first Amherst nightmare because I woke up in the middle of the night last night with a dim sense of dread and anxiety over the new job at Amherst. Nothing especially surprising in that, I had the same kind of thing going on when I was getting ready to come to Skidmore. What was cool though was that as the dream state faded, like a flash bulb the solution to the exercise I was stuck on popped into my head – ‘just use array.sort!’ (I’m paraphrasing for brevity’s sake). I fell back asleep but remembered the episode when I woke and sat there over coffee fiddling with the program I was working on and lo and behold, it worked. Three cheers for serendipity!