Re:Ask HN: What is the advantage of a formal CS degree for ...
by hga on Saturday April 17, 2010 @07:45PM
(#1273986)
A good CS degree will force you to do some things "for your own good" that will be valuable later. Working on the problems with others makes a difference, especially since you'll generally be working with others in real life projects. Just totally immersing yourself in the subject for a solid 3 years is significant, as is being around people who are doing serious research in the field (and ideally joining in). Having someone with a clue on tap to help you through difficult stuff makes a big difference. You need people to tell you what you don't even realize you're not getting.
On the other hand, the CS degrees at many, probably most schools aren't worth much. E.g. look at Joel S.'s essay on Javaschools, he makes the point that if you aren't taught both pointers and recursion you're wasting your time. But of course you have to learn a lot more.
To address the one school I'm familiar with:
MIT's old (and much better, in my personal opinion) curriculum is all on line at OpenCourseWare. At the very least you should do 6.001/SICP and then go from there (and you should do as much of the book as you can, the single semester course can't cover it all, especially after they had to add trendy OO to it). UCB is still teaching SICP and as I recall the lectures by Brian Harvey are on-line (and up to date, unlike the ones by Ableson and Sussman (for a class at HP), although learning 6.001 from Sussman is ... very good).
On the other hand, MIT teaches CS combined with EE; if you have no interest in or need for the latter, you can skip courses like 6.002-4 without too much harm (you do need to learn some basics, and there would be serious value to doing 6.004, it's just going to be a lot of work including the prerequisites, which include differential equations). But do 6.001/SICP first and then see what you think.
On the other hand, the CS degrees at many, probably most schools aren't worth much. E.g. look at Joel S.'s essay on Javaschools, he makes the point that if you aren't taught both pointers and recursion you're wasting your time. But of course you have to learn a lot more.
To address the one school I'm familiar with:
MIT's old (and much better, in my personal opinion) curriculum is all on line at OpenCourseWare. At the very least you should do 6.001/SICP and then go from there (and you should do as much of the book as you can, the single semester course can't cover it all, especially after they had to add trendy OO to it). UCB is still teaching SICP and as I recall the lectures by Brian Harvey are on-line (and up to date, unlike the ones by Ableson and Sussman (for a class at HP), although learning 6.001 from Sussman is ... very good).
On the other hand, MIT teaches CS combined with EE; if you have no interest in or need for the latter, you can skip courses like 6.002-4 without too much harm (you do need to learn some basics, and there would be serious value to doing 6.004, it's just going to be a lot of work including the prerequisites, which include differential equations). But do 6.001/SICP first and then see what you think.