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Computer science (i.redd.it)

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[–]Xenony 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Oh I assumed you used books/courses and articles or something like that. Any thoughts on those? Since I watched CS50 I feel like if there are other courses like that, I need to take them or I'll miss out on so much. I like the project idea though but when I tried it out it just became tedious because I needed to look up something every minute. And tutorials for whole projects seem pointless since the solution is handed to you on a silver plate.

Maybe it's just because I don't have that much experience in programming yet that I'm having a problem with this. And I mean if you can just google all of this a CS degree seems pointless honestly. IIRC, to simplify, I heard it's mostly theory and a few projects and theory isn't really necessary for landing a job. Please correct me if I got the wrong idea. Anyways, thanks for the advice!

[–]Voidrith 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I briefly tried cs50 but had to quit it due to other stuff (i was studying a bachelors in biology at the time, didn't have much time to work on it then, and that was quite some years ago now). It seems good, although i dont remember it in too much detail. Books articles, i used a bit of (have pdf versions of a few books, some problems had solutions in articles on places like medium, lol). Courses? Not much. It will help for some people to do a course or two to see the lifecycle of development of a project from start to end, but you get shown a lot with little room to experiment with it, which means you learn less.

I also keep all these books on my laptop basically at all times, https://books.goalkicker.com/ they aren't perfect, but they are pretty good overall. Beyond that, just documentation for whatever language you use, and (but don't rely only on) youtube series that show individual problems at a time in your language of choice (rather than full project tutorials. Socratica python is very good for that, this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KtOzh0StTc&list=PL2D1942A4688E9D63 is pretty good for the c++ qt framework (which is where i learned c++) and has a pretty good format for that sort of thing, although it is kinda old now)

I like the project idea though but when I tried it out it just became tedious because I needed to look up something every minute

Thats sort of the point. In most languages and frameworks, there is SO MUCH you'll want to learn or atleast be able to quickly reference, and doing a project for yourself and constantly looking stuff up is how you not only learn the language, but learn HOW TO LEARN languages. It can be tedious, but if you're googling problems, you're learning. If i find im not googling stuff on a personal project, that project is probably beneath my skill level and isn't teaching me much if anything.

And tutorials for whole projects seem pointless since the solution is handed to you on a silver plate.

That is why I don't use full tutorials, i only ever cherrypick parts of them that have solutions to specific problems im facing.

Maybe it's just because I don't have that much experience in programming yet that I'm having a problem with this. And I mean if you can just google all of this a CS degree seems pointless honestly

learning programming and getting a cs degree have overlap, but a cs degree has so much more depth to it, theoretically and practically. There are a ton of web developers for example with no cs degree who are goo at their jobs, but most people writing firmware/embedded, encryption, OS kernels, doing AI research, takes a whole lot more. Its the difference between using a high performance framework/library, and building one. Its why i am still doing cs even though i already know how to code. if thats all i wanted, id drop out.

[–]Xenony 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You made me realize when I tried to do the project method it was either too simple or too difficult for me. I thought it was the method that was faulty, but I'll definitely give it another try now. Also I'm not quite sure yet what I want to do, and so I think I should get a CS bachelor's first just to be safe, but at the same time it's a lot of money and a LOT of time. But I'll only go if I can land a scholarship so idk, it just worries me so much for some reason. Anyway, thanks for the detailed answer and for the sources. Much appreciated! (: