[SOLVED] College

[GameYin]

Hello, I am 16, Junior in High-School. I am very good at Coding. I want to be a Web Developer preferably. And I live in Maryland. I was wondering, what college that I live near, would be good for me? I want a college that teaches HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, C#. I don't neccessarily need all those languages tought but I want a good college that can help me succeed in life. Any ideas in which college I should take? All feedback is welcome.

[steelmanronald06]

Firstly, no college is going to really teach PHP unless they have a web programming major...in that case, it would probably be a community college. Universities normally only offer computer science and computer engineering.  Computer science is normally taught Java or C#, and if your not a computer science major you can normally take programming for non-cs majors (c++ usually or VB .NET)  College doesn't really teach you a language, it teaches you the mechanics behind programming and the theory.  With that theory you can, essentially, pick up any programming language with ease.

[GameYin]

So a community college would be my best shot?

[TheFilmGod]

So a community college would be my best shot?

 

Go to college for something better than web development or computer science. - like engineering or buisness. You can ALWAYS learn php/html/css/whatever through good books. I'm only 16 and I think I know more than 50% of all graduates of computer science degrees!

[teng84]

So a community college would be my best shot?

 

Go to college for something better than web development or computer science. - like engineering or buisness. You can ALWAYS learn php/html/css/whatever through good books. I'm only 16 and I think I know more than 50% of all graduates of computer science degrees!

 

I think you're wrong... i think you only know coding but not everything that is taught in college..

[Zane]

Pretty much like steelmanron said.  If you just want to learn how to make websites for a living, go to a community college.

 

But, if one day down the road a newer..popular language comes out and you want to be able to pick it up easily with as few classes/books as possible.....go to a university.

 

I only went to WCU for 1 year and the classes I took, I learned JAVA and Javascript.  Java taught me enough to catch onto Object Oriented Programming so that when PHP5 showed it's OOP colors....I wasn't really intimidated.

[Stooney]

In my opinion, there's far too many books, tutorials, documentation, and forums such as these on the web and in local bookstores to spend the time and money on a college to learn HTML, css, php, javascript and mysql.  C# may be worth it seeing as it's a lot harder to be good at than the others listed (in my opinion).  You won't get any degrees being self taught, but I think you learn more in the end that way.  Nobody partners to copy off of, no rushing through important aspects because your professor gave you a difficult deadline. 

[GameYin]

My community college is really horrible. And I believe I found the perfect college for me. Montgomery College of Baltimore MD. It has a lot of stuff that I want and I might just be able to get in lol. My grades are exactly the best.

[steelmanronald06]

Your best bet is to go to a University and take a Computer Science major with a minor in Graphic Designing. That should put you in the College of Engineering or the college of science, and the minor will be under the college of art.  The only reason that they teach yo a programming language is to use as a reference for the theory that they teach you. Everything you learn in Java or C#, depending on what the language is, will help you to relate to the theories that you study in your other courses.  Take a look at this:  http://checksheets.ou.edu/compsci.pdf  That is a degree checklist for my degree, and it is pretty standard with most universities...that is why all universities have a transfer matrix. That matrix says, "This class at this university is the same as this class at this university." It is an attempt to make sure that all universities teach basically the same thing, and hopefully you will be able to transfer all your classes from one place to the next until you get your degree.

 

Take a look at, for example, the math.  Almost everything is math based. All programming has math, so they just load the math on you. Be prepared for a lot of math. I went ahead and declared a minor in math, because by the time i graduate i'll be able to qualify for that minor.  Then there is Principles of Programing Languages.  This is a primer on ALL programming languages. Learn one and you pretty much learn them all, with the exception of minor syntax differences and some languages offer more/less than others.  also, at the bottom of that page is a list of all the classes again, but with a description of what you'll learn in each of those classes.  Hope this helps.

[roopurt18]

Before I went to college I thought a CS degree meant you know how to program and that's all they taught.  Since I knew how to program before I graduated HS I figured I had it made.

 

My freshman year might have been the first time it really hit me that I didn't know half as much as I thought I did about life.

 

TheFilmGod

You can ALWAYS learn php/html/css/whatever through good books. I'm only 16

That's the only part of your post I found likely to be true.

[GameYin]

I think I know a lot, but looking at some of the PHP and JavaScript source code I randomly look at in websites, I can basically only realize what they are trying to do, I could never replicate such an example without having some outside help such as this forum.

[roopurt18]

Looking at other programmers' code and deciphering it is not even scratching the surface of the topics covered by a CS degree.

 

If you were asked to create a chess program such that the program initially only knew what the legal moves were, but had to learn strategies based on games versus human opponents, would you even know where to begin?

 

The following is the fibonacci sequence:

  f(n) = f(n - 1) + f(n - 2)

  f(2) = f(1) = 1

Could you implement this in a program?  In your implementation, how long would it take for a call to f(200) to execute?  How many times would f(17) be called if I were to call f(200)?

 

If you had a list of cities and distances between them, how would you go about finding the shortest path between any two cities without having to compute every possible combination?  Could you write an algorithm that could visited each city only once and minimized overall travel time?

 

Following is a graph:

Can you arrange the dots on this graph such that none of the lines are overlapping?  Can you think of a practical application for such an exercise within the field of computing?

 

You want to create a website where programmers can upload their source code for other programmers to look at.  You want your site to display syntax highlighting when displaying code.  Can you do this with a single generic program that doesn't have custom functions for each supported language (such as display_php_source(), display_cpp_source(), display_lisp_source(), etc.)?

 

Can you create a compression program?

 

Can you create an encryption / decryption program?

 

There's a lot of topics encompassed by computer science and even the items I listed are barely scratching the surface.  You don't go to college to learn how to program; a book can do that (and much cheaper too).

[neylitalo]

I think I need to get back in school.

[GingerRobot]

Hmm, i think this one:

 

If you had a list of cities and distances between them, how would you go about finding the shortest path between any two cities without having to compute every possible combination?  Could you write an algorithm that could visited each city only once and minimized overall travel time?

 

Is the only which i would know where to start.

 

Although, i think there are two separate questions here? I think i could probably make a reasonably attempt at implementing Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path. Not sure where i'd begin with the travelling salesman problem though.

[GameYin]

Ok thanks for all the help

 

[move]Case Closed[/move]

[The Little Guy]

You may want comunit college/tech college and university/4yr. college

 

In the tech college you will learn the coding

In the university/4yr. college you will get your batchelors degree, which gives you a better chance to get a job.

[GingerRobot]

As for the fibonacci one, a recursive function would be fine for small numbers, but pretty hideous for larger ones.

 

A bit of digging and once again i realise how little maths i know. I've never heard of this golden ration business, which can be used to calculate larger numbers in the fibonacci sequence. Your posts are always interesting roopurt and they often remind me why i've just applied to study computer science for 4 years!

[roopurt18]

The graph one has been one of my favorites for a long time.  In 1999 I took a course called 'Graphs, Games, and Structures.'  In reality the course really should have been called 'Graphs, Graphs, Graphs, and a Shit-Ton More About Graphs.'

 

The only graphs I'd ever seen were those from math, i.e. 2 and 3 dimensional coordinate graphs.  The idea of dots and lines being a graph was silly at best.

 

We had all sorts of problems with graphs.  Prove this about a graph with these qualities.  Prove this about a graph with those qualities.  If a graph has these qualities, what else do we automatically know about it?

 

Then there are algorithms for working with graphs.  Turns out the city-distance and traveling salesman problems are easily solved when represented as graphs.

 

But the problems I hated most in that class were the ones where they'd show a graph, like I did, and ask us to rearrange it so that none of the lines overlapped.  Some of these were very, very difficult and my friend and I used to always get pissed.

 

I still remember my friend having an outburst in the library:

"$%#*!!! <throws pencil> Why does it matter if the $@*@(#$ lines overlap or not?!"

 

So that was 1999.  Fast forward to sometime in 2003 or 2004.  I'm sitting in my digital electronics course designing a circuit and then it hits me.  All of a sudden I thought of every circuit board I'd ever looked at, those green boards with the thin silver lines running all over them.

 

<i>Of course!  An electronic circuit is a graph!  And since they carry voltage you can't have wires that overlap each other.</i>

 

So I excitedly tell my professor about my epiphany.  He smiles and agrees with me.  But then I have another realization...

 

I say to him, <i>But no one is going to throw out a great engineering design just because they can't fit it on a circuit board.  So they must have a way of making such overlapping circuits a reality?</i>

 

<i>They just use multiple boards and layer them.</i>

 

Doh!  Too easy.  I should have thought of that.

 

So think of the situation where you have a massively complex circuit board with hundreds of dots and hundreds of lines and they can't overlap.  I think (I'm not an engineer so I don't know) you'd use graph theory to recursively design each layer so that it has as many lines on it as possible in order to design a motherboard with as few layers as possible.

 

Now one person might say, "Well who cares if theres 3 layers or 6?"

 

But when 3 layers costs 1.5 cents and 6 layers costs 2.5 cents and you're planning on manufacturing 2 billion of them, the businessman certainly cares.

 

---

 

Totally unrelated, here's another fun one.  Let's say you're at AMD's manufacturing plant where they make AMD64 X2s.  What's the difference between the assembly line that makes the 2.4Ghz CPUs and the one that makes the 2.5Ghz CPUs?

[GingerRobot]

Yeah, the graph theory certainly is interesting. Here in the UK it's now possible to do modules in this kind of thing as part of a Maths A-level. Certainly makes a nice break from pure maths or mechanics!

 

Sounds like the content was much less detailed than your course however. I guess the idea of it is to give a fairly general introduction to algorithms and their applications. It's not all just graph theory; there's some chapters on algorithms for other problems, such as the Hungarian algorithm, the Simplex algorithm (which is a bit of a pain, it would be so much easier to write a program to do it!) linear and dynamic programming, sorting and a bit about game theory.

 

One chapter that stands out was one which just contained questions asking you to draw up a table of the values that different variables took when following some pseudocode. It was hilariously easy.

 

I guess that's my main criticism of the modules: they really do lack detail in some areas. There's barely any mention of the complexity of algorithms, which is a bit of a shame - that seems quite interesting in some areas. I also found the definitions of the algorithms quite odd at times; they quite often involved steps requiring human intuition, which seems to rather defeat the object of an algorithm!

 

That said, i'm sure it's been quite useful to study this stuff prior to my CS degree.