Picking up CS really late.....Advice

BCEagle91
Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:25:01 +0000

My thought process in getting both degrees is, I enjoy software
development and I have people and business skills already both
naturally and through my IS degree. My technical skills in software
development are limited, and my knowledge and skills in software
optimization are non-existant.



CS graduates will have more programming experience through the sheer
number of labs involving programming assignments. The theory part
serves two purposes: it allows you to go into computer science and
improves your programming if you go into software engineering or
programming. It is needed in a few programming areas. The theory
allows you to understand the algorithms that others have developed
and allow you to develop your own and understand the relative time
complexity involved in your algorithms or algorithms of others.

There are lots of algorithm books around so that if you need an
algorithm to do a sort or walk a tree; you can just fish one out of an
algorithms book. You do not necessarily have to understand how it
works on understand time-complexity issues if you just need something
for a program that you are working on. You can also go on the web to
get code or code samples on how to implement something. In many cases,
you can go to forums with a problem where generous programmers will
partially (or sometimes fully) answer coding questions.



Sure I can write small programs and modify other peoples code in a
handful of languages, but is that enough in the industry?



With a CS degree you have mostly the same thing. The programs may be a
little larger on the order of several thousand lines of code. There’s
a limit to how much code that you or a small team of students can
write in a semester. You can work on projects with tens of thousands
to millions of lines of code if you want to via the magic of the open
source community. University courses can do this too but I think that
those that do are scarce.