Re:The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse
by nostrademons on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @02:11PM
(#18241827)
I have a CS degree, but I learned basically all of the above on my own. In some cases I also had a class later that taught it, but for most of the networking stuff it wasn't even taught in school.
If you're self-taught and worried about your CS fundamentals, there's a really simple algorithm to get an education better than any CS student at roughly 1/100th of the price:
1. Look up some famous university like Stanford or MIT.
2. Download the course syllabus for the course you're interested in off their website. (Nowadays you can often get the full course, including all the lectures and handouts.)
3. Buy the textbook. When I was in school you could pull shenanigans like buying the European version of the textbook for 1/4 the price or (if you live in a college town) buying the textbook, reading it, and returning it before courses are finalized, but these loopholes have probably been mostly closed. There's now a thriving used-textbook market online that didn't exist when I went to school, though.
4. Read the textbook. Do some of the exercises. Implement the algorithms.
Incidentally, this is largely what CS students do for homework. Most of them kinda gloss over it because it's required, though, while if you're doing this because you really love the material, you've got a big advantage.
If you're self-taught and worried about your CS fundamentals, there's a really simple algorithm to get an education better than any CS student at roughly 1/100th of the price:
1. Look up some famous university like Stanford or MIT.
2. Download the course syllabus for the course you're interested in off their website. (Nowadays you can often get the full course, including all the lectures and handouts.)
3. Buy the textbook. When I was in school you could pull shenanigans like buying the European version of the textbook for 1/4 the price or (if you live in a college town) buying the textbook, reading it, and returning it before courses are finalized, but these loopholes have probably been mostly closed. There's now a thriving used-textbook market online that didn't exist when I went to school, though.
4. Read the textbook. Do some of the exercises. Implement the algorithms.
Incidentally, this is largely what CS students do for homework. Most of them kinda gloss over it because it's required, though, while if you're doing this because you really love the material, you've got a big advantage.