[HN Gopher] Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best course...
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: UC Berkeley's CS61A/B/C are the best courses to learn CS
and coding
I have dabbled with many resources before in hope of learning to
program and learn basics of CS. I have looked at intro course
sequences of schools like MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc. Most have
partial resources locked down. I have dabbled with books and they
felt like shit. Even the book Think Python by Allen Downey was all
over the place. The books and blogs at least taught me basic
syntax constructs like variables, function definition, loops, etc.
But I couldn't understand how to package them up (compose) to use
them in solving problems. Then I started studying through
Berkeley's 3 course intro CS61A, CS61B, CS61C. They have all
materials in the open and if you are following the most current
iteration of the course, they even post solutions to the problems.
It was godsend for me. Now, I am confident to learn more CS topics
using courses from CMU, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, etc. The thing
that was holding me back was the lack of confidence of programming
and understanding really what a program was doing.
Author : ggr2342
Score : 216 points
Date : 2023-08-31 07:18 UTC (15 hours ago)
| itissid wrote:
| Reading other projects code(especially their unit tests to figure
| out code) is an invaluable time tested skill I learnt. Once you
| have learnt the basics of coding getting into doing this is what
| I highly recommend.
| rajeshmr wrote:
| Could you please post urls for the courses so it would be helpful
| to the community?
| trollied wrote:
| https://cs61a.org should get you started.
| matt3210 wrote:
| What about calc 1/2/3 ? I use those skills all the time in
| optimization work. Linear algebra? These are important skills
| that self teachers often forget
| isaacfung wrote:
| Someone shared a long list of visual explanation of math
| concepts a few days ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37305485
|
| I haven't gone through all of them but I definitely recommend
| 3blue1brown and betterexplained
| drcwpl wrote:
| Try these:
|
| An interactive website https://seeing-theory.brown.edu that
| takes you through some of the most critical probabilities and
| statistics concepts.
|
| Statistics 110: Probability
|
| If you want a more advanced overview of Probabilities and
| Statistics, this course from Harvard University is an excellent
| introduction:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2SOU6wwxB0uwwH80KTQ6...
|
| This is MIT Course 18.06, taught by Professor Gilbert Strang.
|
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra...
|
| One of the best linear algebra courses that you'll ever find.
|
| Essence of Calculus
|
| This is Grant Sanderson's excellent take on calculus:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDMsr9K-rj53...
| beeburrt wrote:
| Is Strang that guy that just retired?
| fsckboy wrote:
| yes
| arctic_relegate wrote:
| Professor Leonard on Youtube got me through calc 1/2/3 just
| last year.
|
| I will forever worship the ground that man walks on for his
| mathematics help.
| jstx1 wrote:
| MIT 18.01, 18.02 and 18.06
| fsckboy wrote:
| and 6.007 and 6.041
| aabhay wrote:
| I did not appreciate it at the time but CS 61 abc absolutely
| transformed by foundational understanding of computer science and
| the concepts they push are absolutely and non-negotiably
| important for someone to learn.
|
| My only recommendation is to learn programming in a more useful
| and productive language like C++, as the thing you do not want to
| do in CS61A is to simultaneously learn to program and learn the
| concepts in those courses. The right way to think about it is
| those courses are trying to make you go "ohh that's how things
| actually work".
| pharmakom wrote:
| I think that a pure programming course must be taught in Lisp
| since that is closest to the essence of computation with minimal
| syntactic overhead. once that is mastered, switching to an
| industrial language is just a matter of mapping a particular
| syntax to a subset of lisp concepts. The old MIT courses follow
| this approach and are on youtube.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| mapping knowledge is a learning antipattern IMO. It gets you
| very far, a good primitive more-so, but you fundamentally
| struggle to learn new paradigms.
| debanjan16 wrote:
| Different things workout for different people. I was overwhelmed
| by so many ways to do things in Python and everybody teaching
| their own favourite way of doing things. Similarly, all I was
| learning was the syntax and no problem solving skills.
|
| Then I cam across the book How to Design Programs aka HTDP. I was
| skeptical at first. But I eventually started and worked through
| the second edition of the book available freely at
| https://www.htdp.org .
|
| It was so beautiful. The teaching languages and writing examples
| before writing code. It made me really understand programming.
|
| Now I can pick up any language (not that I become a language
| expert overnight) in a short time. I only need to map the
| concepts to this new language. And that's that. I can even
| pattern match my ideas from higher order functions to imperative
| looping constructs.
|
| I have another book in to TDR list. It is Norvig's Paradigms of
| Artificial Intelligence Programming.
| theak wrote:
| Had a similar experience. Came in to college with very little
| programming background and wasn't sure if CS was right for me.
| Truly enjoyed CS61A and how simply it worked up from primitives
| to explain more complex concepts over time in an approachable
| way. The best part was no hand waving and everything was fully
| explained.
|
| I had previously tried to learn Java as my first language and
| never could make sense of all of the "public static void
| main(String[] args)" and handwaving involved to write a simple
| hello world.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| One person's best learning resource is another person's
| nightmare.
|
| We still have not understood how to tach coding. The subject
| seems to be completely non linear, and some people get stuck and
| cant move on and the teachers cant figure out why and they cant
| figure out why, it could last 1 month or could last 5 years, and
| at some point some random thing they read or watched completely
| unlocks them.
|
| (For me the thing that helped me was Richard Buckland's Higher
| Computing lectures:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE7l6Adoiiw&list=PL6B940F08B...)
|
| The best way to learn is to keep trying and particularly trying
| to understand what you do not understand.
|
| As Feynman said on his last board: What I can not create, I do
| not understand.
|
| So if you are one of those people who is stuck, or you watch
| CS61A/B and it does not work for you, just keep looking and
| trying.
| x1f604 wrote:
| > The subject seems to be completely non linear
|
| Is this not the nature of learning in general? Why is it
| supposed that learning things in the linear A-B-C-D fashion is
| even possible for most humans, rather than supposing that most
| people would need to revisit certain topics before learning new
| topics, e.g. A-B-A-D-C instead of A-B-C-D?
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| By linear I did not mean the order in which you study, but
| rather how your understanding builds up, as in, how much time
| you put in, and how much you grow.
|
| For example if your native language is subject verb object
| (cows eat grass) it is quite linear to learn subject object
| verb (cows grass eat) languages (e.g. Japanese), you put in
| time, and you make progress. There are other subjects where
| when you get stuck you cant move on, and the pedagogy and
| androgogy systems we have came up with for math/physics and
| etc are getting better and better to understand what people
| don't understand and how to move them further. Which on its
| own is quite problematic when you have a class of 30 kids and
| you are moving with the 'average' kid which does not exist.
|
| In the same time, programming is fairly new, and teaching it
| is still evolving, educators still disagree on what is
| important and in which order (reminds me a bit of this
| Feynman video about 'Greek' versus 'Babylonian' mathematics
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaUlqXRPMmY)
|
| There was a great example someone used, the amount of people
| who get confused by the equal sign, and some actually never
| go through understanding references and values for many
| years: x=5 y=x x=6
| print(y)
|
| and a=[] b=a a.push(1)
| print(b)
|
| Now I am teaching my daughter and I spent about 3 days per
| week just on pointers and strings (We even made a card game
| we play from time to time https://punkx.org/c-pointer-game/),
| and I can see when she is stuck and what exactly she is stuck
| on, but how can you do that with 30 kids, when the most
| subtle nuance in the questions they ask can give you the
| deepest hint in what they are missing?
| phlakaton wrote:
| I think I generally agree. A student getting stuck on something
| doesn't mean they're not learning. To the contrary, those can
| be some of the times the student learns the most.
|
| In the case of them not "getting" pointers, for example,
| getting stuck might reveal they need to go back and solidify
| their understanding of the memory model, or how data is
| represented. These are good things to know you don't know!
|
| Even getting stuck on yak shaving can pay dividends - having
| the student carefully compare their command to the
| instructions, learning what does and doesn't work, and
| patiently building experience with their tools. Even if they
| feel like they're doing nothing, they're probably learning.
|
| So I think the major problem with self-study using online CS
| materials isn't people getting stuck per se... it's that those
| materials are no substitute for teachers and a cohort of
| learners. Some people do just fine without that support! Others
| do not.
| [deleted]
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| > To the contrary, those can be some of the times the student
| learns the most.
|
| I agree, its like 'level up' in a video game :) but I think
| it is very hard to not despair when you are hitting your head
| against the wall for too long. If you check the
| learningprogramming[1] subreddit it is full of stories of
| people giving up.
|
| It seems in programming, maybe because the pay is so high,
| the intersection between good teachers and good programmers
| is not very high.
|
| I read a some of papers investigating `how to teach mastery`
| and was comparing tutors vs tools, and the very best results
| were from tutors + tools (sorry I tried to find links in my
| history but couldnt). Tutors beat tools, Tools beat not
| getting any help, but even the best tools were not substitute
| for a teacher.
|
| Maybe now with chatgpt the tooling will greatly improve, for
| example having an random error most kids just give up and
| wait for next lesson to ask a question, but now they can just
| past it in chatgpt, and most importantly they can ask chatgpt
| the stupidest and most embarrassing questions that they would
| never ask in class, or to their teacher.
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/
| meroes wrote:
| It's so true and refreshing to hear. If I had to characterize
| my own successes in learning, they come from very "honest"
| teachers, and those aren't always in intro courses. A few
| examples, learning PowerShell from Snover, one of the creators
| via Microsoft Virtual Academy (probably a bit dated by now) or
| Calculus 3 from Professor Leonard on YouTube. I often have to
| go through a few dozen resources to find the one that works for
| me.
|
| We also can't teach math well for the masses, there's a long
| history of failure. Like New Math or the STEM pipeline.
| Embarrassing stuff really and I don't know what a good solution
| is. It's one reason I don't totally hate the new approaches to
| how math is taught that get lambasted on social media (this is
| not New Math which was much earlier) because the past isn't
| working well enough.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| Good point but I'd go further. When you're stuck and start to
| struggle and sustain through that, that's where real learning
| happens.
| brightball wrote:
| I still remember how confused I was in my 101 course at
| Clemson. I was certain I was going to have to change my major.
|
| Then one night on a project I was just staring at the code at
| 3am...and it suddenly all made sense. Got A's in all my CPSC
| courses after that too.
| imadj wrote:
| > We still have not understood how to tach coding. The subject
| seems to be completely non linear, and some people get stuck
| and cant move on
|
| The same can be said about any subject or skill.
|
| If you go to any class, you'll find some people are interested,
| others aren't. No matter the subject, be it sport, physics,
| math, chemistry, art, history, etc. Same teacher, same
| material, different reaction from students.
|
| There's no artificial "ceiling" at play that's specific to
| coding.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| I think the problem with coding is that people who are very
| interested still get stuck, I suspect this happens less often
| with people interested in chemistry/math etc. (possibly
| because of survivor bias because people drop out of it
| sooner, because there is no money in it)
|
| There are countless reports of people 'not getting it' after
| studying for 4 years, they cant make fizzbuzz, and I dont
| mean they dont get some nuance of it, they literally cant
| even start typing.
|
| I dont think there is artificial "ceiling" to coding, I think
| we still have to learn how to teach it, and particularly how
| to teach it to a mass of people.
| ah27182 wrote:
| I went to Cal, so I took these classes. 61A and B we're both
| amazing, but I always felt like the material for 61C wasn't laid
| out well.
|
| I've heard a lot of good things about Harvards CS-50, not sure
| how that compares.
| gnulinux wrote:
| Before coming to college I had tons of programming experience and
| two interships. I wrote websites, backends, real life
| applications shipped to customers, school club websites, I even
| taught C++ in my high school's IEEE chapter. CS 61A completely
| changed my perspective on how to think about code, I found it so
| valuable that I could graduate just with 61A, study everything
| else (algorithms, data structures etc) myself and be fine with it
| (this is likely an exaggeration of course, there is _some_ value
| to finishing a traditional CS curriculum).
| sgloutnikov wrote:
| CS61A - https://cs61a.org CS61B - https://sp23.datastructur.es
| CS61C - https://cs61c.org
| [deleted]
| Ryoung27 wrote:
| People like you are the best type of people out there.
| realjohng wrote:
| Disagree too. These courses were also known as "weeder" courses
| so less students do the major, which can't support all the
| interested students, so they're overly difficult. Anyone
| learning, I would start with JavaScript and make small fun stuff.
| jedberg wrote:
| They weren't overly difficult. They were just the same
| difficulty as the rest of the CS classes at Cal. If you
| couldn't pass these you wouldn't pass any other CS course.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The CS61 series was excessively difficult compared to the
| upper-level material, and it was absolutely because it was
| intended to weed people out of the major.
|
| I got A's in all of my upper-level CS courses at Cal.
| Cryptography and compilers were a breeze compared to the CS61
| courses. My average grade in the CS61 series was a B-. The
| semester I took CS61B (data structures), my grade on the
| final was 21, out of 100. The average grade was 16, and the
| highest score was 35. (The 35 is a VC now and is fairly
| active on HN.)
| jedberg wrote:
| They aren't intended to weed people out through difficulty,
| they weed people out through honesty. They don't dumb it
| down or make it easy just because it's the intro course.
|
| It's very clear in the catalog that the course is not for
| non-majors.
|
| It sounds to me like you learned how to study after you did
| the 61 series, which is why you did better in upper div (I
| also did better in upper div for that reason).
|
| Also, 61B was graded on a curve, and you did better than
| average. The tests were hard so that the people who truly
| grasped the material could demonstrate that. Profs hate it
| when a bunch of people get a perfect score, because then
| they don't know who the best is (and so do the top
| students). It's done that way not to be hard and make you
| drop, but so that talent can be truly differentiated.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 1) I took several upper-division classes _before_ I took
| the 61 series, which I took in my 3rd year. (For my
| CogSci double-major, I didn 't take the pre-req until my
| final semester, long after I had taken all of the upper-
| division classes.)
|
| 2) It is my understanding that most of the weeding
| classes (CS61 and their counterparts in other majors) are
| now graded on a curve, but they weren't back then: your
| grade was your grade. Hilfinger and others like him are
| the reason for the change. Quite ironically, several of
| their colleagues noted at the time that these professors
| would not have passed their own exams if they hadn't
| written them. (The story making the rounds back then for
| the reason that Hilfinger agreed to curve his class:
| after arguing for a week that students deserved the
| grades they earned, he took a test prepared by a
| colleague trying to demonstrate that his test was too
| difficult, and failed.)
| jdale27 wrote:
| _The semester I took CS61B (data structures), my grade on
| the final was 21, out of 100. The average grade was 16, and
| the highest score was 35._
|
| Hilfinger?
| peterleiser wrote:
| I took CS61B with Hilfinger in '96. That guy was a
| character. In one lecture he didn't let a person answer a
| C++ question because he said "no, you already learned C++
| in highschool. I want a virgin". People tried to avoid
| his classes, but you learn a lot from Hilfinger.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Lol yes, it was Hilfinger. He originally tried to flunk
| the entire class until the administration forced him to
| use a curve.
| mng2 wrote:
| Calls to mind a Hilfinger quote from my CS61A experience:
| "Mike Clancy makes the tests; I make them harder."
| aripickar wrote:
| I don't think they were the same difficulty at all as some of
| the upper divs. Classes like CS 170 (Efficient Algorithms),
| Cs 189 (ML) and CS 182 (Deep Neural Networks) were all
| significantly more difficult than any 61 series class.
| jedberg wrote:
| Of course a computer scientist would call out my imprecise
| language. :)
|
| What I meant was that it's difficulty was in line with
| expectations for a lower division course given the
| difficulty of the upper div courses in the same major.
| fdye wrote:
| I once saw a young lady in the lab in Soda hall getting
| obviously frustrated. A few moments later she exclaimed, "Why
| is it so f**ing hard!" and then as if in a cartoon slammed
| her forehead into the lab computers keyboard repeatedly
| before a TA noticed and came over to help. It was like
| something out of a cartoon. I've taken CS/Programming courses
| at a few institutions and never seen quite that level of
| despair/frustration. Maybe its just a CAL thing, I didn't end
| up transferring to CAL in the end so CS61A was the only class
| I did on campus, so can't really say.
| gnulinux wrote:
| I personally had a blast and absolutely incredible time in both
| CS 61A and 61B. That they're "weeder" classes can be considered
| true only from the perspective that they're challenging classes
| but note that almost all CS/Math classes in Berkeley are highly
| challenging and these weren't outliers at all.
|
| Before coming to college I had tons of programming experience
| and two interships. I wrote websites, backends, real life
| applications shipped to customers, school club websites, I even
| taught C++ in my high school's IEEE chapter. CS 61A completely
| changed my perspective on how to think about code, I found it
| so valuable that I could graduate just with 61A, study
| everything else (algorithms, data structures etc) myself and be
| fine with it (this is likely an exaggeration of course, there
| is _some_ value to finishing a traditional CS curriculum).
| peterleiser wrote:
| This. I went into the CS program cold, no prior programming
| experience at all. After CS3 and CS61A/B/C my relationship
| with my brain changed entirely. My approach to deconstructing
| and then solving problems, of any kind, radically improved.
| trelliscoded wrote:
| CS61A in particular is important for understanding the nuts and
| bolts of how programming works. The people who tended to do well
| in the course had little prior exposure to specific programming
| languages outside the prerequisite class. I think that all the
| abstraction that other programming languages do get in the way of
| understanding why the languages made some of those design
| choices, which is why throwing all the abstraction out the window
| is important to understand what's really going on.
|
| I'm reminded of an experiment I was told to do when I was
| learning how to be a better cook, and I complained that I didn't
| understand what bay leaf was adding to a dish. Someone suggested
| cooking some plain white rice with some bay leaf, and I could
| finally taste the peppery notes it added. Sometimes you need a
| neutral substrate to see the details of the thing you're trying
| to learn.
| [deleted]
| Cjcrew wrote:
| CS61A Lectures Playlist:
| https://www.youtube.com/@JohnDeNero/playlists
| talldatethrow wrote:
| I went to Cal but for MechE. Im also a totally self taught full
| stack web developer, although just on a personal miniSaas with 34
| paying companies.
|
| I think you'll learn tons by starting a personal project, tiny,
| small, daunting, whatever your appetite for pain is, and just
| doing that.
|
| I thrashed away on my crm like saas for 6 months before the first
| demo customers were using it. And then worked on it for another
| year till it was sellable to less friendly companies.
|
| Recently I picked up a JavaScript book and read it. While I
| learned a few things, I was shocked how much I knew from what I
| learned from stack overflow and just random reading and thinking
| during the time of building that CRM.
| pamelafox wrote:
| I was a CS61A lecturer for 3 semesters. I thought that we covered
| very valuable content, but also did not think that it was
| appropriate for new programmers. I encouraged students to enroll
| in a true intro class, like CS10, before embarking on the 61A
| journey.
|
| Here's my post about how to audit 61A :
| http://blog.pamelafox.org/2022/07/how-to-audit-cs61a.html?m=...
| fdye wrote:
| Took CS61AL (Lab version) about a decade ago. Even knowing how
| to program and working in industry for several years it was not
| easy. I think my class was one of the last to use Scheme before
| they switched towards Python and was entirely taught with SICP
| Book. Probably the biggest difference between sort of
| traditional programming courses and CS61AL is you have to
| essentially understand and do recursion day one. It sort of
| blew my mind compared to the way I learned because generally
| you do simple statement programs, then functions, then for,
| while, do while, etc. Then finally around maybe chapter 10 in a
| traditional book you get to recursion. CS61AL, SICP, and its
| lots are great, but they very quickly touch on discrete math
| and calculus concepts and how they relate to programming/CS.
| Ditto for first-class functions and Lambda's, all introduced
| very soon in CS61A. Great course though, was a serious
| challenge from something I thought I would skate through.
| Definitely made me a better programmer.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| I learned nothing in 61A -- because I was a dumbass kid and
| didn't take it seriously.
|
| 61B made me feel like I knew how to program.
|
| 61C taught me how computers work.
|
| A decade or so later 61A is actually the most useful of the 3
| courses now that I'm mid career.
|
| I might recommend that you take 61b first before the other 2 if
| you're just starting out
| golly_ned wrote:
| Agreed on 61A. I took it when it was still just SICP in scheme.
| I saw much of the rest of the curriculum as a variation on the
| themes I learned in 61A.
| dsingh wrote:
| I agree although at the time these classes seemed so
| unnecessarily hard.
|
| I was fortunate to take - - CS60A with Stuart Russell - CS60B
| with John Ousterhout (now Stanford) - CS60C with Paul Hilfinger -
| CS150 with Randy Katz
|
| I believe (after watching videos online) that CS10 The Beauty and
| Joy of Computing is also a wonderful intro course to take before
| the CS61 series.
|
| My daughter took CS61B with Paul Hilfinger and he was so gracious
| to take a picture with the 3 of us together. I have it here on my
| office desk!!!
| whatsup7123 wrote:
| CS61A was great when they taught via LISP (Scheme). Have they
| switched to Python? Probably still good but would be nice to have
| LISP.
| phforms wrote:
| You probably know this already, but if anyone wants to learn
| "old-school" SICP with Scheme via video lectures, I recommend
| MIT 6.001 (taught by Abelson and Sussman themselves):
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...
|
| The book is amazing, but it is also very extensive/overwhelming
| and I found that the lectures provide a better guiding
| structure for myself and the lecturers are also quite
| entertaining at times. The website also provides additional
| material related to the course such as exams, projects and
| lecture notes.
| pamelafox wrote:
| It now starts in Python and ends with Scheme (building a Scheme
| interpreter in Python).
|
| Source: I lectured 61A in 2021
| mistrial9 wrote:
| some people could not stand these classes (in a previous
| incarnation) and found an assembly language class at a community
| college instead, at that age.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Going to hard disagree here and say this is _extremely_ person-
| specific. I already knew how to code in C++ and Python from high
| school AP classes. CS61A was _awful_ for me and made me hate
| computer science. I tested out of 61B. 61C taught me how
| computers actually work and simultaneously made me quit the
| major.
|
| Here's my take: if you are interested in _computer science_ , the
| combination of these classes is great. If you are interested in
| _being a software developer_ or _building things quickly to solve
| problems_ there are far better resources out there.
| gojomo wrote:
| Given your testimony, I trust you that it's person-specific -
| especially since my experience at Berkeley, back in the
| CS60A-CS60C days (with Scheme) was almost diametrically
| opposite.
|
| My 80s high school had no programming classes to speak of, but
| in my own tinkering, I'd done a lot of BASIC & Hypercard
| Hyperscript tinkering, & I'd looked over enough assembly &
| Pascal to get the gist. I felt, "I'm good at computers, I can
| learn what I need there on demand, I've got to major in college
| in other deeper subjects that I can mainly learn from those
| departments." And, "being a software developer" alone seemd too
| narrow an ambition - I thought I'd instead be "someone-good-at-
| software" in some other kind of innovative industry.
|
| Still, I took CS60A because I didn't want whatever watered-down
| stuff they'd provide to non-majors - Pascal, I think, at the
| time. Within a week or 2, CS60A convinced me: there's more
| interesting depth to 'Computer Science' worth learning.
|
| That continued through CS60B, and by the time I'd done CS60C &
| the combined EE intro theory & lab course - EE1(?) then, I
| think, unsure its current equivalent - I'd felt like a circle
| had been closed on my understanding of how it _all_ works, from
| logic gates (which I 'd understood since a 5th-grade science
| project & then "Rocky's Boots") through to high-level stack-
| based languages.
|
| I was hooked, & then knew CS would be at least one thing I'd
| major in. I ultimately double-majored it with Economics.
|
| Then once out in paid employment, I'd work with people with
| Bachelors or even Masters degrees from schools not quite-as-
| famous for their Computer Science programs, and those people
| would be missing basic knowledge & intuitions about algorithms,
| data-structures, & OSes that'd been well covered way back in
| the Berkeley CS60A/B/C intro series.
|
| Of course, the depth of tools & experience available to kids
| through high school age is wildly different, & better, now.
| And, if your highest goal is professional training as a
| software developer, college itself (& college-style courses)
| may not be ideal, compared to just doing as much as you can, as
| fast as you can, in the most-challenging workplace that'll take
| you, filling in gaps with self-study as needed.
|
| But if you want a high-quality college-style education in
| Computer Science, with the breadth & depth for lots of
| possibility-frontier work - not just the surface stuff evident
| to a younger or outside view - Berkeley's curriculum was an
| excellent eye-opener for me. For precocious students, it should
| probably _replace_ any "Python & C++" coding in AP high school
| classes.
| bhl wrote:
| > CS61A was awful for me and made me hate computer science.
|
| Valid criticism. Think for most students, 61A has too steep of
| a learning curve for an introductory class. For people without
| any programming experience, it's a bit too much too fast and
| with a class size of 2000+, you struggle for resources.
|
| For those with prior experience, it feels like unnecessary
| training wheels. You learn a little bit of Python, SQL, and
| Scheme. You have to do environment diagrams (What Would Python
| Do) on paper, and learn how to use a debugger. Projects and
| tests have mad-libs style fill in the skeleton code.
|
| In my experience, 61A is a tasting menu of computer science:
| you take it for the experience, and leave hungry and confused -
| but excited.
|
| > I tested out of 61B.
|
| OP, you really missed a lot by testing out. This class is half
| theory, half learn by doing. For example, you learn about red-
| black trees or Dijkstra's in lecture and then go to lab and
| implement it.
|
| I know theory and algorithms seem bland at first, but look at
| the applications.
| https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~wayne/kleinberg-tardos/
|
| Favorite aspect of this class was designing and then writing a
| smaller version of git. You had to write a design spec that was
| checked off, and then your implementation had to pass a test
| suite.
|
| If that's not software development, then I don't know what it
| is.
|
| > 61C taught me how computers actually work and simultaneously
| made me quit the major.
|
| 61C was not one of my favorite classes because of how low level
| it is (compilers, RISC-V, concurrency, etc.). But if you
| stopped taking classes before upper division, you missed out on
| a whole gamut of "practical" classes like algorithms (CS170)
| and operating systems (CS162).
| baq wrote:
| Yeah it's important to point out that programming is not
| software engineering is not computer science.
|
| Computer science mostly requires a pencil and a piece of paper.
|
| Programming is the act of making a computer do what you've
| written down on that paper.
|
| Software engineering is figuring out what do you need the
| pencil for and once you've done it, making sure computers are
| doing what programmers think they told them to.
| tenkabuto wrote:
| > Software engineering is figuring out what do you need the
| pencil for
|
| Could you please elaborate on this? :)
| argiopetech wrote:
| SE is a project management discipline. CS is a logic/math
| discipline.
|
| SE gets you to think about what the customer needs, what
| sort of performance or regulatory constraints may be in the
| loop, how you can design for teams and the future, etc
| (i.e., do you need a pencil or a pen, and how the factory
| is set up to make that happen at the rate and in the time
| required by the customer).
|
| CS is about algorithms and logic, performance optimization,
| etc. It's the step where you build the machine that cuts
| the pencil blank, puts the graphite in, adds an eraser...
| and the conveyers/etc. that transfer the bits to the
| appropriate place for them to be useful.
| baq wrote:
| Programming is like 20% of senior+ software engineer time,
| on a good day. The rest is spent all sorts of communicating
| - emails, presentations, specs, docs, figuring out
| incidents, in general trying to make sure the team is
| building what should be built - or efforts which support
| the business and/or the team, like fixing or optimising
| CI/CD, monitoring, hiring, reviewing backlogs (note
| plural), mentoring juniors, helping out sales or support
| with customer issues, working with support of your service
| providers, etc. This is especially true in big orgs with
| many teams, in smaller ones you might see a bigger share of
| pure coding-related work depending on a week... or coding
| overtime because there simply isn't enough hours in a day
| to open the IDE normally and these guys still like to code
| something every now and then.
|
| Computer sciency stuff is maybe 1% on a good year
| (obviously there will be exceptions depending on the
| products you're building).
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I would assume they mean gathering requirements, aligning
| with other team goals, etc. before picking up the pencil.
| Which I agree, is a huge part of "engineering" vs.
| "programming"
| enjoylife wrote:
| > 61C taught me how computers actually work and simultaneously
| made me quit the major
|
| I'm genuinely curious, why did the course make you quit? Was it
| the material or the professor, or something else entirely?
| beeburrt wrote:
| > ...there are far better resources out there.
|
| Such as?
|
| Genuinely interested.
| jedberg wrote:
| I would contend that you can't be great at _being a software
| developer or building things quickly to solve problems_ if you
| don 't understand the computer science taught in these courses.
|
| You might be good, you might get some stuff done, but you won't
| be great.
|
| I say this as someone who has been around this industry a
| while. You don't need a fancy degree from a fancy school, but
| you _do_ need a solid basis in theory. Some of the best
| developers I know never went to college, but they did learn the
| theory on their own.
|
| And some really poor developers did go to college, but their
| college didn't emphasize theory, and so they aren't very good
| when something happens just outside of what they learned, or a
| new problem presents itself.
| golly_ned wrote:
| It sounds to me like the original poster is saying they're the
| best courses for them because all the resources are available
| and up-to-date rather than because the content is superior.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-31 23:02 UTC)