Most important and useful CS courses?

turbo93
Fri, 17 May 2013 08:23:52 +0000

If you spend your career on large systems that cost lots of money, architecture is important so you could get your money’s worth out of the hardware. If you develop for itty bitty machines, embedded, mobile, etc. it’s important for obvious reasons. The gray area is in between, i.e. write code for PC’s which are so fast these days one does not have to worry much about architecture. Still a good course to have.

Software engineering as pointed out above by ucbalumnus should give great exposure to team programming. We had to do this in the context of a different class (1983 :)) in ‘Systems Development’ or some such, but that’s the idea.

We spent a semester as a team of 7 writing the HR/payroll module for a company all in COBOL, using forms (screen based). Several other teams did A/R, A/P, inventory, etc. Many thousands of lines of COBOL code. Hilarious, tedious, frustrating at times, but very entertaining overall. That was my first and last course thru undergrad and grad school that involved team programming. Later on they started teaching more team programming to the undergrads.