<p>I took AP CS last year but I feel like I didn’t really learn much.
I had the opportunity to speak to people who program for a living and they told me that once you “know” how to program (in any language), you spend the rest of your career reading a specific company’s choice of language, libraries, APIs, etc.
I thought about doing CS as a major but if that’s all CS is, I don’t really think I want to be a CS major.</p>
<p>I am still a high school student btw.</p>
<p>The only thing you need to read are assignments and stackoverflow when you get bugs on some classes. CS is about math, logic and Problem solving skills. I hate reading stuff that is too formal and packed with big words.</p>
<p>You will have to read documentation and other people’s code.</p>
<p>If reading is something you don’t want to do a lot of in a job, you’re in for a not too pleasant surprise assuming you want your education to relate in some way to what you do for a living.</p>
<p>Looking up something in a book isn’t what I call “reading.”</p>
<p>“I had the opportunity to speak to people who program for a living and they told me that once you “know” how to program (in any language), you spend the rest of your career reading a specific company’s choice of language, libraries, APIs, etc.”</p>
<p>It really depends. Sounds like a Java or a .Net, the two mainstream languages in especially business IT, programmer to me. But to consider CS and that quote in a same paragraph, boy, you’d missing a lot of what CS is about. I would even say that the true CS types totally loathe the mainstream IT business, as well as these unsophisticated programming languages that they’re bound to use, because there are much more interesting and “better” things out there.</p>
<p>No-one also knows how to program in any language, because there are languages that the no-one may not have heard of and new languages can always be developed. Thus there’s no such thing as “knowing how to program in any language” (unless that language is math, and you can get pretty far in that), it’s about knowing a specific style and vocabulary in a style family of programming languages (e.g. object-oriented), but that’s not “all programming languages”, because there’s and can be more that hasn’t just been conceived. In every new language, the ability to use it is just about studying it.</p>
<p>I’d say CS is very much about and often requires a lot of reading (the writing code part is really about using your existing knowledge, but whatever you don’t know, you read. And I’m not talking about trivial programming tasks/problems.). I don’t know how it compares to some engineering fields e.g. EE in terms of the amount of reading that one can do, but, if taken seriously, you will never stop reading in CS, because there’s math and then there’s computation. In the big picture, it’s just about how limited you consider your life to be, if we talk philosophically.</p>
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<p>I’m starting to realize this, and it’s disappointing.</p>
<p>CS careers tend to be a ton of reading, be prepared to do your own reading learning subjects outside of the school criteria like extra languages, data structures, design analysis, etc. CS IS meant to be hard, you can’t expect to learm everything in school. Developers spend their careers learning new technologies and updating their knowledge of their field to keep up to date with their skills. CS is a skill, you cannot treat it as something you just “learn” it’s something you have to refine even after college. Most of this knowledge is through books, reading code, learning concepts, ETC.</p>
<p>Computers are constantly evolving, and so are the programming languages. You could graduate after 4 years of school, and the next day a new programming language that becomes the industry standard could be released. You’ll have to do a lot of reading to learn that new language if you expect to be competitive. I know this seems unlikely, and it probably is, but you will have to adapt to change, and that will require you learning new languages on your own time if you expect to be marketable in the future. This will require reading a lot.</p>
<p>You are confusing two different things - Computer Science and programming. Computer Science is mathematics and problem solving. </p>
<p>Programming requires you to be very resourceful, which means that you will be buying books, reading documentation, googling errors you get, etc. etc. You won’t be reading books cover-to-cover but rather on a “as you need it” basis.</p>
<p>Overall you do not need to be a good at programming to major in CS.</p>