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Ask Slashdot: Online, Free Equivalent To a CompSci BS?
An anonymous reader writes "I am a middle school math teacher and I also run a programming club. I recent completed my M.Ed in math education and was inspired to try to do the new GT online MS in Computer Science in a couple of years. I have some background in programming: two intro to comp sci courses, Java, C++, Python, the main scripting languages, and a bunch of math background. I also read through this great article on getting these pre-requisites completed through Coursera but unfortunately you need to wait for courses to enroll. I would like to just learn these on my own time, no credit necessary. Suggestions?"
The Art of Computer Programming Volumes 1 - 4A.
You can learn basically the entire CS curriculum of MIT. This guy did it in 12 months, which is quite extreme, but it shows that the material is all there, and you can of course go through it (or parts of it) at your own pace.
If that's what you want, then fair enough - just don't expect a CS degree to deliver that. The CS theory I learned has proved useful in various phases of my 25+ year career, but your milage may vary.
As a recent CSci graduate from a state university in California, I can tell you that there's far better content online than you'll pick up in a class, so good job checking out that area. MIT has a lot of great courses on YouTube, such as their algorithms lectures from Cormen, and edX has a fair amount of content as well. There's also a lot of books out there if you can pick an area that interests you the most, such as mobile or web, that you can just read through and type up the examples yourself. The thing about programming is that you tend to learn more from doing than from listening to lectures, so if you can just sit down with a book, online tutorials, etc., and just make programs and figure out why they don't work on the first go (and when you pass the forloop/if statement section of your education, they probably won't), then you'll be golden.
Computer languages fade in and out of popularity every single decade. It is not like people stop using those languages but the jobs market turns elsewhere.
The theory at least has remained more or less constant throughout the entire time.
If you want to get good at what most programmers do these days, learn to use Eclipse, Spring, and JQuery to hack together existing libraries. A programmer who can actually write code is rare.
Other way around. If you learn the new hot skills, you can get a low level job where you'll struggle and work poorly because you don't really know what you're doing. Then when the buzzwords change, you'll be unhirable. If you learn the theory and fundamentals, you'll write better code more quickly and be able to easily pick up new technologies as they come along. Theory always trumps "real world" skills.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
You know some decent languages and have a background in Mathematics. Dont' waste your time, CS is no more than an Applied Math degree "in drag". All you need is some experience which can be obtained by volunteer work, e.g. maintaining the web site of a no kill animal shelter.
BTW, since you background is in Math Ed., I assume you have good people and communication skills. That is a great way to differentiate yourself from the pack. You could end up running a tech firm if you do it right.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
not a degree equivalent, but could be part of a larger program.
https://class.coursera.org/ml-005
Sure, if being a code monkey is your ultimate goal
This is blinging
yes what about the other stuff at Ivy League that is next to useless for the job like PE classes at prices (for 1 class) that are higher then 2 year gym membership at high cost place.
History of the Roman Empire
History of Rock and Roll
and so on
and the school system should be setup better for people who want to learn new skills with have to deal with the old system / old college time tables.
Saylor has one of the most complete, free, college degree equivalents that I have seen. The best part is many degree programs have links to video lectures, full problem sets and exams.
http://www.saylor.org/majors/c...
Their math stuff is decent, and that's what I'm competent to evaluate, so based on that I'd think the compsci would be good too. Some degree areas are not complete yet, but compsci is.
While, CS is definitely applying math, it lies somewhere between Math and Software Engineering. It is certainly not what you minimize it as.
We would all be better off with a good knowledge of the history of the Roman empire since we seem to be following down the drain the disasters of its later stages.
No. Years of study in order to implement the ultimate type safe language is absolutely useless.
Programming is fun!
Learning how and why it all works is easy enough just by using it, if you're competent. If you're incompetent (like most programmers are), then just give up.
As long a you don't intend to get work from it, there are tons of alternatives for learning the information that would be contained in the course.
Typically speaking, just doing the necessary coursework, as Scott Young did, isn't enough to make you employable, even if you do it in a context in which you end up with a degree. It's a good part of it, though, since it certifies that you would be able to use the same words to communicate about algorithms, etc., when talking to peers, which is something you probably wouldn't be able to do otherwise. A lot of the communications in any technical field takes place in a higher bandwidth shorthand, or jargon, which lets you communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time.
Consider, for example, if you don't speak portuguese, your teaching credential and experience, valid though it may be in an English speaking country, won't transfer over directly to being able to teach even your top subject to a non-English speaking class.
No. Just straight up no. Any idiot can learn how to fumble their way through a programming language's syntax and API (albeit it may take them a while in some instances), but if you want to actually be a real computer scientist or software engineer you need the theory. I've been programming for 10 years now, 3 of it beyond getting my bachelor's degree and the code i write now is worlds better namely because of the information I learned while working through my BS in Comp Sci.
Seems odd and out of character.
should say: "fundamentals trump real world skills". And usually the fundamentals and real world experience go hand in hand.
The current problem is CompSci is taught via syntax and people are certified immediately... unlikely typical linguists. For example, you can take an accelerated course in Arabic, but you'll likely get it wrong and insult someone in a bazaar in Cairo.
And theory is just that.... theory. Any academic approach will fails 90% of the time in the real world, hence RMS's bazaar (real world) vs. cathedral (theory) analogy.
Of course "pro-theory" advocates has a scapegoat: in the real world; if you didn't do it right, it's because you didn't follow the theory as most academics would say (e.g. Agile's "you didn't do it right" excuse). The irony....
School is only a starting point to gain basic knowledge. The only way to learn to code is by coding. All of the truly excellent programmers that I know have no formal education in programming, but they all love doing it, and that is the key. No amount of education will make a good programmer if they don't love doing it. Code is not really a tech skill, it's more a literature story telling, with non-fiction bindings skill.
It requires technical knowledge, of course, but it isn't classical engineering in nature.
While, CS is definitely applying math, it lies somewhere between Math and Software Engineering.
Anything to do with user interfaces will have a fair chunk of applied psychology as well (and some appreciation of parts of physiology too). What's more, people doing theoretical CS tend to go much deeper into discrete math than the normal math student does.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I've seen plenty of people that were excellent at math (some working on an MS in it...) that couldn't write a worth a damn program if their life depended on it. Not saying the OP is necessarily that though. It does give you a very firm background for CS (just getting my BS I ended up one class short of a math minor anyway, and even then I had to learn basic multi-variable calculus and applied differential equations when I took physics), but there are still quite a number of high level CS concepts one should learn. Again, the math background makes them SIGNIFICANTLY easier to grasp, but taking classes or doing course-type related CS would still be quite valuable.
As someone with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, I can tell you that if your CS degree is applied-maths, then you really should find another course.
Pretty much, when I was at uni, the CS guys couldn't do the maths side of the courses and the maths guys couldn't do the CS side of the courses. There's an overlap of, at most, a few "theoretical" courses (so much closer to pure math, to be honest) - graph theory, coding theory, logic, etc.
But ultimately, they are separate for a reason. Otherwise, CS would just be another area of mathematics rather than a subject in its own right.
That said, education is a lovely thing to have, but if you want recognised education, it kinda stops at your second degree. Past that, you wouldn't need to prove yourself career-wise in the vast majority of jobs. And, in fact, a masters or a PhD speaks volumes more than any amount of undergraduate degrees.
If you're doing it for yourself, do it for yourself (and good on you!). If you're doing it for career "brownie points", then do the job, or higher education, instead.
As long a you don't intend to get work from it, there are tons of alternatives for learning the information that would be contained in the course.
One of the key differences is that taking a formal course on it forces you to study the boring and hard parts as well as the fun bits; often they're important for gaining a real level of understanding. (I suppose that's true for pretty much any subject.)
If you do intend to use it for the purposes of obtaining employment, you'll need to actually take the exams at an accredited institution. Otherwise the employers won't know you from some random jerk walking in off the street claiming something which isn't true. No accusations, but from their perspective, self-taught is indistinguishable from untaught (unless you've got a solid portfolio of work or a good history of working in the area, in which case nobody will really care about the degree).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
This is all Python centric but that's where the jazz is these days:
I've got a 15 year old masters in CS but I went through the coursera and udacity stuff and learned quite a lot along the way. Good stuff.
TCAP-Abort
It really depends on what is meant by computer science. A lot of CS degrees today contain a lot more software engineering and general programming than they do theory. A person can take a lot of more traditional CS classes (e.g. compiler theory, cryptography, automata, algorithm analysis, etc.) which are are fairly heavily math based, and probably learn a lot, but they won't necessarily help with programming ability or the kinds of things that are more generally useful today.
If someone just wants to build websites using some framework or some casual programming, odds are they won't need to know a lot of those things. I think that if you're going to be a professional software developer, those types of courses can open you up to new ways of thinking and problem solving that will be valuable.
To me there are really three different areas: computer science, which is mostly math and theory; programming, which is translating algorithms into code; and software engineering, which encompasses the entire software lifecycle and managing it. A software professional probably wants some knowledge of all three areas, but it's likely that they'll tend to specialize in one particular area.
I went to Georgia Tech, and it certainly does NOT have the "ivy league" mentality. In fact the place prides itself on the practicality of its curriculum. The university actively engages industrial leaders to shape and form its curriculum to keep it current with demand.
I don't know what the deal is with the online Master's, though. I completed my attendance there when the Internet was just starting to take off, so I don't know if the same resources are available (like the Alumni mentoring program, etc...).
inB4 Joe "tard school is bettor" dragon.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
An unverified Scotsman told me Hadrian's would have been fine if they'd installed it the right way round. So I kicked him in the nads. Fucking porridge wog, who does he think he's calling a barbarian?
You should have a look at the average course structure of a BS program. Normally it contains the following elements:
- Math. hopefully graph theory, lin. algebra, not so important for most things, but still often found in curricula analysis
- CS theory: first-order logic/predicate logic, Turing machines, grammars (the Chomsky stuff) LR, LL, LRAR, regular languages, mu-recursion, the language Z or objective-Z (however this item is optional)
- Different programming paradigms. Best learned with special languages: functional -> Scheme/Lisp/Haskell; OOP, but you already know that.
- OOP programming and design pattern
- Software engineering: UML a bit, use case forms etc., different types of project management: agile, RUP and V-model (only basic principles)
- Hardware: basic analog electric components, transistor etc.; FPGA etc. VHDL or something similar; basic CPU designs, 3-address code, gate architecture (pipeline is often too complicated)
- Some other basic field. Robotic, e-learning etc.
- Some extra stuff from a different field (hopefully not a science and not economics)
There are plenty of books on most of these topics. If you would live in Germany you just could enroll at the next University for free and checkout their courses. Or go there without enrolling. In most cases no one would check if you are a student ;-)
I find that most folks with a degree and no talent are experts at defending the value of the degree, while those without one do all the work, and advance the state of the art! If your not an EE, then your only a computer consumer, not a scientist of computers! The CS degree was designed to separate you from your cash, the result of the explosion in education lending. Suckers, LOL.
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blo...
The simple fact of the matter is that a 4-year university's computer science program is not meant to provide job training, and as far as career skills go, you could pick up a CS degree equivalent of job skills in under a year.
I wrote about this the other day, on the Ask Slashdot: Modern Web Development Applied Associates Degree topic, and I'm sticking to my guns on it. You don't need any math more complex than simple algebra. You don't need any theory classes.
Some of these theory classes may provide better insight, and lacking them may limit you if you're attempting to enter a highly specialized, complex field with no demonstrable experience in it (which, by the by, doesn't really happen), but for 98% of your day job, it's going to be more important for you to know how to parse and sanitize input than it will be for you to know how to write a compiler, raytracer, decompose a function into mathematical terms, perform a Big-O analysis, design a memory manager for an OS, and you'll probably never use matrices or differential equations.
Hell, the grads I see now a days haven't got a concept of efficient design, most lack basic database skills, awareness of common libraries, common development tools, never used any team-based tracking systems or source control, and so on. Unless they've struck out on their own, they're almost completely unsuitable as candidates. Many of the self-taught devs seem to have a better grasp of things, if only because they end up attempting to write usable software from design to implementation, instead of homework assignments demonstrating polymorphism and recursion.
On the other hand, for many HR departments, a degree is go/no-go. You'll never get to an interview without one, and there's no free, online equivalent for that. You'll just have to make do with having superior technical skills, and try to apply at a company that values that more than a sheet of paper.
Go forth and read the "friendly" manuals, /SERIOUSLY/!
No. Years of study in order to implement the ultimate type safe language is absolutely useless.
Or it lands you a job for $250k at Google/Microsoft research.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Hell, I made more than that as a programmer with just a B.A. in Econ.
Clearly everybody else is Doing It Wrong, and you're the One True Genius who certainly Knows How To Do It Right.
Hell, I made more than that as a programmer with just a B.A. in Econ.
Good. When other programmers make more money, it raises up the salary for all of us.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
With all respect...
All the comments that you'll be getting from Slashdot readers will be worthless to the point of your question. As you may have noticed by now, every responder assumes that you want to learn to how to do what they consider a dream job in CS to be. And they give replies like 'read Knuth' or 'do MIT on-line courses'.
Since you already have an excellent job with a good future, and you have already studied elementary program texts in CS languages like Java, allow me to suggest that you ask the middle school students in your programming club what they would consider to be cool and useful programs to have. After you get through the fantasy aps like ' a really cool game that the player doesn't end up always losing' and ' a smokin' 3-D interactive girlfriend' or ' a bio-implant that will allow me to get perfect SAT scores without studying', then you might get some interesting suggestions.
Personally I suggest that you and your programming students develop Arduino and Raspberry Pi applications. The elementary 'blinking LED' stuff, simple robotics applications, and digital television art projects made from inexpensive TFT displays will be fascinating to middle school and high school students. (hopefully).
Since when is "everybody else" trying to implement the ultimate type safe language?
Learn to read.
Why not get a masters degree in mathematics (non-Ed)? While taking classes in higher mathematics you will encounter problems where you can apply your programming skills. And since you're a math teacher, taking more mathematics classes will make you a better mathematics teacher (yes, I know this is generally considered false). Also, it will improve your career opportunities in mathematics. Even if your current job is great, people in the real world get jealous of smart people and try hard to derail their success, ESPECIALLY in the education world.
Apparently you aren't as good as you think you are if you're worried about that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's how it started. The first CS degree was Cambridge's Dip.Comp.Sci., taught out of the Mathematical Laboratory. I think that the best way to see CS is as an interdisciplinary subject which sits between pure maths, engineering, and psychology.
I didn't say that I was good, just that I was well payed. There *IS* a difference you know.
And to that my answer doesn't change.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Non sequitur.
This! If I had a dollar for every line of code written by very "productive" coders that was part of an architecture that was actually a nightmare when it comes to scalability, availability, or manageability, I'd have a lot of dollars. There is more to "computer science" than programming; a lot more.
I have found, however, when one does not yet have an abundance of expierence, that having a formal education makes a significant difference to just getting by the initial filtering process.that many companies use.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
All but one of the courses in the infoworld article have past sessions that you can access the content of. Just check the "Sessions" drop down on each course's page.
You might be able to cover some of the topics from the missing Programming Languages course with something like Paradigms of Computer Programming from edx: https://www.edx.org/course/louvainx/louvainx-louv1-01x-paradigms-computer-1203 . If you browse the courses from coursera, edx, and udacity, you might find additional courses with related topics.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of valuable, raw knowledge out there, and a lot of the textbooks I had for my CS degree are available, and are not textbook-y material, and I've see a few suggested in this thread.
But I don't think an "online" equivalent to a CS degree exists.
A good CS degree is fundamentally incompatible with working online, on your own time. I really respected the program I was in, and whether it was working on open source or any other sort of project, one of the most valuable aspects of the work was learning to work in a team, as you probably will in the real world. I had at least three entire courses devoted to learning how to work in teams. Divvying up work, writing documents, communicating, etc etc.
There's also the aspect of working with professors. As ugly and horrible as some of the assignments they gave out were (I'm looking at you, compilers coursework), there is a degree of f'd upedness in the stuff that professors can throw at you that's not present in the clean examples you normally see in books that you find in class. Again, nothing is really a comparison to having to work in a team or with a professor to find your way out of a requirements hole. And there is nothing for earning real world experience than having to muddle through coursework assigned by a professor that doesn't speak your native language (which trust me, will also be seen in the real world.)
Also, there's just the face to face work with professors. I found my computer graphics course super valuable, and that was taught by someone very active in the OpenGL space. I could probably get a book by someone also active in the field, but it's not the same.
The worst CS degree programs I've seen simply try to reproduce what you'd find in a book and charge you $30k-$40k a year for the privilege. You could probably reproduce that in online coursework, and if that's what you want, then I wish you luck. But if I'm reading the question exactly as posed, and you want something that could be treated the same as a CompSci BS but on your own schedule and online, I don't think such a thing exists. At least not something I'd want that would convince me to hire someone.
I could see a hybrid approach working, and now that I think about it, that's probably close to what I had. About half my time in my degree was spent off on my computer logged in to campus servers hacking away, but that other half of working with teams in person just can't be substituted for.
If you're just looking to pick more programming knowledge to continue teaching middle school then you do not need a MS for that. MIT's Opencourseware is a great place to start: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
I have a Java site: http://sites.google.com/site/f... They're pretty self explanatory. Three semesters worth.
I have a site that is free and has three semesters of Java lectures called: http://sites.google.com/site/f...
"Catch...or catch not. There is no 'try'!"
...until you have to write a truly complex system. Then, knowledge of correctness, algorithmic complexity, graph theory, functional and operational paradigms, etc., will separate the low end code generators from the people who actually design and build the system.
The skills you need are related to how to think about the system, find an appropriate approach to designing and implementing the solution, and being able to demonstrate that it is effective. Putting it into a language is a last step.
I can't tell you HOW MANY TIMES I've run into people who think they know how to build a system because they know a tool. And they are fine, until I ask them about timing and randomness, data complexity, parallelizing on a massive scale, and so on. And then I have to explain the CONCEPTS so they'll even begin to understand the questions I'm asking.
Learn the WHY of what's going on. You can always pick up a tool.
Disagree. This theory is MORE important than the particular skills. Because that fad language you learn today may be ignored in 5 years, or 10, or 20. But the theory still works. We have hundreds of thousands of code monkeys who write crappy code but very few who write good code. There is no CS class I've taken that has turned out to be pointless; and I took every one of them except databases and VLSI (and those two are useful also).
Even if some class is pointless as far as skills; the whole point of university is to LEARN and those classes are good at teaching you to learn and forcing your to think. Whereas learning how to use some new framework or language teaches you very little. Teaching you to do a job is not the point of a university education. You can go to a trade school for that, learn how to program at the junior college in half the time. The university is training people for life, for adaptability and versatility, to make someone well rounded instead of just a code monkey.
Attempting to learn the minimum necessary is the same as attempting to be ignorant.
We were taught Miranda (very similar to Haskell) in my bachelor's program. It was the primary language for most of our exercises across many courses. It is an effective lnguage for teaching many fundamental aspects of programming like recursion, and algorithms - expressing quicksort in a functional language is not only more elegant and considerably shorter when compared with c or Java. That was over twenty years ago, but to this day these functional programming abstractions have been invaluable in shaping my designs, and thought processes involving any kind of programming whatever the actual language I'm using.
Some people want to box things up into compartments. Sure it's useful to know Roman History, but that's for other people they think. So they learned Java and know nothing else but that, and leave the repeating history thing to politicians. They leave the theory to the mysterious people who write Java frameworks and runtime (possibly they're wizards), they leave the optimization of their programs to the customer who's job it is to buy a faster computer every year.
This isn't just about preparing someone to be a leader; plenty of people are happy being followers. However people do need to be prepared to know when a leader is worth following, ability to point out when a leader is wrong, whether that leader is the POTUS or a CEO or a manager.
You sir are a poet.....able to produce posts whose entire text is nothing but a description of itself. Well done, well done.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
At least they reference something. See my previous comment about your last two.
Will for some reason think the new hot thing is totally different than what's come before. (Oh no, we're looking for someone with more experience in C#/Java and not over a decades worth of experience. Of course we don't understand that those languages were expressly designed so C++ developers can easily move over to them and the fact you get inheritance, polymorphism, and templates don't count because you only know the C++ version.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
You're not going to write much useful software in bash without calling expr, sed, awk, grep, etc. - all separate programs. When you use echo, basename, etc. you don't necessarily KNOW whether you're calling an external program or not.
On the other hand, an experienced Perl programmer rarely calls external programs. The full functionality of sed, awk, grep, basename, echo, and most other system utilities is available within the Perl language itself. The one notable thing Perl often opens a pipe to is sendmail, for configuration purposes. You could write sendmail in pure Perl. In shell, even "hello world" may well call /bin/echo . Perl is an interpreted language, shell is a scripting language.
This most certainly does not mean shell is BAD. She'll scripts are very useful. They are useful SCRIPTS.
Mechanical engineering is applied math.
Therefore, if you have a math background, you're all set to be an engineer - no engineering classes required, right?
A good math background will make CS much easier. It is, however, a distinct discipline. For example, to study algorithmic complexity, some math is needed, so someone who already understands the pure math will have a head start. However, they still need to learn the patterns to quickly estimate complexity and be able to "see" which type of algorithm might have lower complexity.
In many ways, CompSci is to finite math as finite math is to arithmetic. You need arithmetic to learn all of finite math, because it's based on arithmetic, but it goes beyond arithmetic. So to CompSci requires knowledge of set theory and other finite math, but it goes beyond. See for example SQL, aka relational algebra and relational calculus. A math background will teach you about set operations, but SQL is set algebra on sets on tuples. You don't normally restrict sets of projected tuples in math class.
This. It may seem to conflict with other credible posts that indicate alot of programming skills were gained in a CS program. It's important to note that CS is kind of a mash-up of disciplines that was as much of a creation of the marketing department as academia. It seems like a logical major to have, but the discipline suffered b/c it became popular at a time when many academics couldn't even check email!!!
The key is what is your **a priori** knowledge. In other words, it's all about what you know going in.
If you want to do actual **computer research** as in working on new processor designs or something like that, then you will want a CS degree.
Otherwise, parent is the best advice.
Thank you Dave Raggett
My CS degree delivered that. Not as an official part of the curriculum, of course, but a particular teacher's desire to show us the right way to do things. (Reading slashdot discussions helped, too.)
Yes and this is a major improvement that took decades. Alot of talent was wasted b/c some CS majors didn't write code until the 3rd year.
It grows out of a misunderstanding of what 'computing' is as an academic discipline & non-tech academia's inherent inability to understand something new & adapt.
Now...are we saying **how things are** or **how things should be**
I'd agree you're close to 'how things are' but it's not how they should be.
CS, programming and 'software engineering' should all be **one major**
Everything in computing involves interacting with machines to give them instructions.
Humans giving machines instructions. That's computing. It's a simple description of a complex action, but it is accurate! Why fight it!
CS theory could be covered in 2 4hr class sections. Alot of CS programs expand the 'theory' aspect in order to "justify their existence" on the balance sheet. It's an administrative power play. All academic disciplines do it to some degree.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Saylor Academy offers a complete CompSci course for free: http://www.saylor.org/majors/computer-science/
Paid or Payed. There *IS* a difference you know.
At the big companies maybe. Although the better big companies are smarter than that. At the startups not at all- generally because there is no HR department and the engineers/former engineers are hiring directly. Working at them, the only time I've seen someone hired for a particular skill instead of problem solving ability and intelligence is when we had a short, hard deadline and needed a subject matter expert for just a month or two.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Knowing how to program in C is nice, but pick a langauge (C is good) and do different data structures in it: linked lists, doubly linked lists, trees (height balanced, B, B+, Red/Black, etc), do AVL tree traversal, inserts, updates, deletes. Use trees to do artificial intelligence (state space search, alpha/beta pruning, depth first/breadth first/best first search). Compare and contrast different sorting algorithms (compare bubble sort to quick sort to shell sort to bucket sort to tree sort: compare the run times using big O notation), learn graph theory, dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, and other algorithms for traversing a graph, show how these are used in computer networks (particularly the internet), show how these are use to route ambulances, fire trucks, aircraft, determine the best sequence of steps to create pharmaceuticals or explosives, the closest/best arrangement of microchips on a printed circuit board (least number of via holes spatially). You should also delve more into networking (read W.Richard Stevens works on Unix Network Programming volumes 1 (Networking API's, Sockets and XTI) and volume 2 (interprocess communication, threads, pipes). Know what CSMA/CD is, token-ring, know the difference between a port and a socket. (A socket is a port combined with an IP address). Know what subnetting is, how to calculate broadcast/network IP addresses, the steps to code a server/client. You should also review combinatorics (you said math, but that could be calculus which is good, but not quite on the mark), and also linear algebra. You should also study tupple relational calculus, propositional relational calculus and predicate calculus (for databases, and AI). Differential Equations and Laplace Transforms not quite so important here), although if you are doing graphics, you will need all of that and more, along with the linear algebra. You should also study some logic design (AND/OR/NOT/XOR/XNOR) logic, state graphs and state theory) ...if for nothing else you can understand how databases can pare information and also understand 'stateful inspection' in routers and networks. If you take courses like cryptography you will need more math, or numerical methods (more math), you should study natural language processing, and also learn about compilers and turning software into bits. You should also learn about operating systems (know that cache memory is used to implement a translation lookaside buffer and acts like a high speed index to all the program entry points of the software running on your system), different run-time models (compile time/load time/run time address resolution)--important for shared libraries, infix/prefix/postfix notation, know what pipelines are (laundry is a pipeline.. wash, dry, fold... no one does all the washing, then all the drying, then all the folding: you take the first wash out and put it into the dryer, then put in another load into the wash, then take the dry clothes out and fold while the dryer is drying and the washer is washing... this is a pipeline. Know what a stack frame is, know what a program counter/CPU registers are, know what a context switch is, know what DMA (Direct Memory Access) channels are, know how they move data around without interrupting the processor, know what an interrupt is, know the difference between edge triggered and level triggered interrupts, know what a shared interrupt is, know what an interrupt service routine is, know what round-robin task scheduling is, know what elevator seeking is, know what a virtual machine is, know what virtual memory is, know what a logic race is, know what a spinlock is, know what a 'fatal clasp' is, know recursion (in order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion), know what double-tail recursion is, and why its bad. Know why dual pipelines effectively double the performance of a processor, (and so understand how pipelines fail: branch mis-prediction, data dependency problem, page cache misses). Some schools want you to know a bit about hardware too, (chip fan-in,
This is what *school* is for, not University.
I hear Americans laud the 'breadth' of their university system with arguments such as the above, but frankly this kind of stuff should be taught *before* university, not during it. I, for instance, learned the 'History of the Roman Empire' when I was 18. Likewise a bunch of other history stuff that I later dropped in favour of the sciences.
School should be for your 'broad education'
It should funnel into your chosen subjects which then funnels into
University - which should be your *specialisation*. Not a continuation of generalities. If by that time you don't consider yourself a 'well rounded individual' then take up some evening classes on your own, rather than watering down the education you *should* be getting in your specialist, chosen subject.
This, frankly is why I consider american degrees to be nothing more than watered down bollocks. If I go to uni to study 'comp sci' then I want my degree to be 'comp sci' not 'some comp sci classes, plus some bullshit yoga / tennis / geology' stuffed in with it when I could be learning *more specialist comp sci' stuff instead.
-- did his degree in Artificial Intelligence and didn't suffer a single non-degree related course and is proud of it.
You forget about expertise and experience.
There's a big problem with this vocational approach you advocate. History of the Roman Empire may not seem to be of any immediate use, but it is.
And it's also something you can do on your own time. Quit wasting everyone's time by forcing them to go to filler classes. I can rationalize forcing literally any subject down people's throat, no matter how mundane or useless it is. It's quite easy to do, and especially so when you say vague things like you do throughout your comment, without providing any real evidence of anything.
We have our 'broad' (and yet it still manages to be about nothing), force-fed education right now; it isn't working.
Thank you Dave Raggett
We have hundreds of thousands of code monkeys who write crappy code but very few who write good code. There is no CS class I've taken that has turned out to be pointless; and I took every one of them except databases and VLSI (and those two are useful also).
Anyone worth their salt will be able to figure out the how & why just by doing things and doing a bit of thinking. These code monkeys who write crappy code would be just as incompetent if they 'learned' (they'd just memorize facts, because they're unintelligent) the theory, because they're not intelligent enough to understand it or apply it.
Thank you Dave Raggett
One of the key differences is that taking a formal course on it forces you to study the boring and hard parts as well as the fun bits
If you don't have enough willpower or intelligence to study such things, chances are you don't have the aptitude for it anyway. Just give up, if that's the case. Too many losers going to colleges.
Otherwise the employers won't know you from some random jerk walking in off the street claiming something which isn't true.
Then maybe employers should get off their lazy asses and actually evaluate people. That's what my employer did, and I actually have a good job and work in a good environment. You don't want to work for any employer who hires HR drones.
Thank you Dave Raggett
1. you should now that Computer Science is not about programming.
If you learn a programming language for CS, look for the "pure" ones, not for the real-world ones (efficient, lots of libraries).
Examples: Eiffel/Ruby for OO, Prolog for logical, Lisp/ML for functional, Pascal for procedural, and not least C/Assembly for hardware-close.
2. check the curricula of a few top universities (not necessarily American) and understand what the required basics are.
3. use iTunesU and hear some top University lectures. In contrast to Coursera, there's no waiting time, no price, etc.
4. for the books, each area has it's "Bible". Go for those; other authors are generally not that good.
Examples: the dragon book for compilers, Norvig for artificial intelligence, Tanenbaum or Kurose/Ross for IP networks etc.
Well I'm a sailor and as far as I'm concerned it was a chain or continuous line of payments so I don't feel at all wrong in using that spelling.
Go get thee bent.
It seems to me that both Math and CS students could use some more "set theory" training. We live in a world full of information. Sorting, arranging, and reporting on that data is becoming a bigger task. Even a small business has more data than you can manually validate. You need some good database setup and understanding to make sure what you get out of it is correct.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Surprised nobody seems to have mentioned the Berkley Webcast yet. http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ It is an online collection of class videos, lectures, and course materials for a variety of subjects including computer science.
Their into to CS is much easier to get into for a beginner than the MIT OpenCourseWare. http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
How do you know you didn't take any courses not related to your degree? I find this very surprising coming from someone in AI, as it's a very interdisciplinary field, borrowing from statistics, optimization, logic, neuroscience, psychology, control theory, language, etc.. Look at your own field and the failure of expert systems. For a long time, statistics was not core to AI research. Now, some of the most successful AI techniques in robotics have a foundation in statistics. Or consider reinforcement learning, which has roots in animal psychology. As an artificial intelligence researcher in the 80s, you might have looked at animal psychology and said "Bah! I don't want to learn that! It's not a core degree requirement! When would I ever need that?" Because of the interdisciplinary work of researchers in the 80s, animal psychology in the form of reinforcement learning is now a core component of your field.
I think the bottom line is you just don't know where you'll find inspiration. Maybe you've missed out on a lot yourself, and I don't think that's something to be proud of.
Just to counterbalance this, I recently switched from doing academic physics research to a programming career. Now I'm a senior software developer with a wide variety of experiences (currently Android internals). I've taken exactly one comp sci course: data structures. That course was helpful but habitually writing, reading, and debugging code has taught me most everything I've needed. Reading code is very important, as is starting programming at an early age and applying it to whatever you're doing. Learning a variety of languages is also important as each one brings its own paradigms. I read a patterns textbook once but didn't see anything that I wasn't already familiar with. I just learned terminology from that.
Still, if one is new to programming I'd have to think that getting a degree one way or another would teach a lot in a short period of time. I had never really thought of programming as a profession but rather as a tool that was necessary to whatever else I wanted to do. Economic pressures turned my hobby into a profession. I'm still just a bit grumpy about that even though I'm having fun.
all "CS majors" are not created the same.
first, you tell me what is useful for designing processors. You tell me who makes them & what kind of degrees they have.
2nd, tell me how those things you listed, graph theory etc....tell me, in your words, how those concepts are useful in the 'real world'
if you can't engage at that level you're trolling...
Thank you Dave Raggett
and if you had a better knowledge of the history of Rome you would know that that is bullshit.
Absolutely, some exposure to social science and psychology should be required. The reason is the massive mistake of the Javascript Textarea Widget as the standard for communications and the widespread use of blogs. The design of web logs, blogs, and their misuse is an engineering decision made by web site owners and social media companies and it is a huge error based on the psychology of human communication. We are seeing the misapplication of programming and data structures and data mining in the area of human communication on the Internet and that is due to the ignorance of designers, whether computer scientists or not, to human factors and to the way that the chosen technology inhibits effective communication. This is especially obvious when the answer was known and used long BEFORE the decisions were made about websites and blogging. In the test-based era of Mail User Agents and related tools, it was well understood what people needed to write to one another effectively, and that has been replaced by simple tools that are not as effective and interfere with proper communication.
It would be easy for someone with a social science and psychology background to test blogging against its alternatives in discussion forums to find out what design helps people communicate effectively and resolve what differences they have. I bet that such a study will find that people are more satisfied with greater complexity available in the older discussion forums than in a blog.This huge error is due to the narrow training of designers. if not the greed of the investors in social media companies. Google has an archive of USENET postings from 1985 on, and it consciously chose to ingnore the lesson of the older designs,
The opposition to Dice's Beta UI for Slashdot is actually rooted in exactly the same error. It is why most of you dislike Facebook so much, Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants "Simplicity" but not so his users can talk to one another without pain, but so that his business partners can spy on users easier. So tech deserves to fail for not taking user psychology into account in its design choices.
... in the subject field, your post looks like this to me. Splitting the first sentence like that between two fields is confusing. The subject line is supposed to contain a summary of your entire post so that people can decide whether or not to open the full text when it's shown abbreviated, not a meaningless half-sentence. Thank you.
Acm student membership with the digital library option is $42 a year. This is golden for you as a student and you might do some profesional networking. If you can eventually grab the professional membership some people are impressible.
About the only substantive thing you had to say about the Romans being wrong is about walls, and that shows a lack of understanding of what the walls were for. They were never to keep barbarians out, because that doesn't work, and it's been known that it doesn't work for a long time now, the exception being if you've got enough diplomatic contacts to tell where the wall will be attacked.
They're more for punishing the invaders. Block off the place where the barbarians breached the wall, and pin them to it on their way back. Then kill them to discourage the others.
Other techniques include small fortifications scattered behind the wall. Barbarians historically really sucked at siegecraft, and so most of the fortified places would survive, giving Roman reinforcements assistance in addition to safeguarding the population and valuables.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Hence the use of ellipses. If you don't know how to read works that use them, that's not the fault of the writer.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Engineering is just math + requirements+real world constraints; exactly the same as CS.
I've heard that explanation before, about the Great Wall of China. Even if the walls were fantastically successful at pinning and trapping escaping invaders, they failed to keep Rome secure. The barbarians kept coming past the walls, and ultimately Rome fell to them. Punishment doesn't deter invaders who are facing the worse problems of starvation or pressure at their own backs from invaders still further out. Rome needed to treat with the barbarians and understand what was driving them, then if possible address their problems, not wall them away and try to ignore them. It might not have been possible for Rome to solve the barbarians' problems, but the walls were definitely no solution. Nor was it a solution to declare that the barbarians' problems were not Rome's problems. Problems do not ask for permission before crossing national boundaries.
Walls are one of the most seductive non-solutions available. People persist in thinking that fences make their property more secure, when they often do just the opposite as they provide excellent cover for burglars! They keep dogs in and little kids out, but that's about all. One of the most infamously ineffective walls was the Maginot Line. It is as General Patton said: "Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man."
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
gosgog:
Go to Udacity.com New Courses: Georgia Tech Masters in CS & Data Science
The only Roman border walls I'm aware of are in Scotland. The barbarians that did [Western] Rome in were Germans.
Only because they didn't finish it - they missed the bit from Luxembourg to Dunkirk Even then, if they'd used the freed up men to form an overwhelming offensive force elsewhere they could still have won or at least stalled the boches.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is the Limes Germanicus, which, while not a wall everywhere, was a fortified boundary. It was the Rhine and Danube rivers, with, at times, a palisade connecting the two.
The Maginot Line was not originally intended to reach the coast. Too costly. The French were counting on their British allies to stop any German advance near the coast. When Britain made it clear they could not or would not help the French enough with that idea, it was too late to extend the Maginot Line even if they discovered the political will to pay for it. They were also counting on various marshy areas being impassable to tanks, but tanks improved enough between the wars that marshes were no longer an effective barrier. Before the war started, the Line was already near worthless. The money that went into it could have been used elsewhere with much greater effect.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Walls are not in themselves solutions. They need to be part of a strategy. Roman diplomacy did extend well beyond Roman borders, and the Romans did offer some barbarians refuge within the Empire. Rome fell because (a) there were too many barbarians, and (b) succession was never really settled, so the Western Empire kept too much military force internally.
The Maginot Line was quite effective. It guarded the Franco-German border well and reasonably economically. This allowed the French to assemble a large striking force for the plains of Belgium, planning to meet the Germans as far forward as possible. The gap between the flanks was covered by the Ardennes Forest, and the French High Command considered it essentially impassible for armies. That was the really stupid thing that led to the fall of France, not the Maginot Line.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Without understanding the theory you are not going to be able to do much other than be an API monkey.
Universities exist to produce an educated populace, it is not a job training center.
The European Union has been far more effective than the Maginot Line. That was one of the first mistakes France made that lead to WWII: being too harsh to Germany at the end of WWI, so that the German people were ripe for radicalization. The French should never have needed to defend themselves at all. Diplomatically, it's terrible. Highly provocative, loud in announcing distrust of a neighbor, and it looks weak next to a robust military.
But since the French couldn't bring themselves to make a lasting peace with Germany then, they had to think of defense. The Line is still a bad idea. When Germany reoccupied the Ruhr, all France had to do was rattle some sabers and they would have pulled right out. Instead they cowered behind a wall. When the war at last broke out, suppose the French had figured out that the Ardennes Forest was passable and had to be covered, either by the Line or the army. The Germans in turn would know this, and could get past the Line in many other ways-- paratroops, or another front the Line does not guard like maybe Switzerland or even Spain, or possibly a surprise amphibious assault via u-boat. They could also assault the Line. It can't dodge artillery. Punch through at a few points, and ignore the rest.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"