How to prepare for CS in college

randint
Sat, 01 Feb 2014 04:52:37 +0000

The thing is, introductory CS courses vary widely from one school to the next. You said you are going to a competitive school, if it is one of those that happen to use a functional language, it may be a bit troublesome for someone who have solely programmed in an imperative, object-oriented language in the past.

Take my school, for example (I am in Canada, at the University of Waterloo), it is one of the schools that uses the functional language Scheme, which means:


No variables, you are only allowed to define constants.
No loops, if you want them, use recursion.
Everything else is flexible (dynamic typing in a language)
No one cares about I/O (let’s focus on math, and not how a BufferedReader reads input or how a BufferedWriter writes output).