Dealing with a bad CS curriculum

I'm in my 3 term are university, in a third world country, and I've sort of realized that my program is really bad. Architecture class? Didn't get past boolean algebra and basic logical gates. Intro to programming? Didn't teach the principles, just learned specific c++ stuff Now I'm taking Programming I and it starts from the very beginning instead of building up from Introduction to programming On top of that, 80% of classes are filler. So, how should I go about learning by myself, without getting overwhelmed? Few months ago I started a learning plan for myself, but i ended up burning out having to balance doing homework for my uni and doing my own study Today I'm taking a day off to rest and think. My plan now looks like this: Simply get some books on the same topics I'm studying in the given term, and expand what I learned in class trough them. What would be a good strategy? Balancing self learning and college I also need to catch up on Comp. Arq and some math

I'd like to piggy back this question to ask if there are any good resources to learn CS online. Sorry OP.

Get a few books on the topic, read the first chapter of each so you know which one fits you best, read that one, keep the others around as backup. Reading a technical book is not like reading a novel. You may not understand many things at first. You might need to take breaks every so often. Usually when you're having trouble through a chapter, slow down. Go back to where things stopped making sense. If you have trouble remembering exactly what some word meant or the details of some concept, go back and read it again. Be sure to take notes. It has worked best for me to keep a dedicated notebook and writing down the main points of each chapter to refer back to when needed. Think of what you're reading, always make an effort to make sense of everything you read. If a section proves to be too hard right now skip it and keep a bookmark to remember where to pick it back up. The latter sections of a chapter usually contain minor details while the core of the topic was delivered in about the first half. It also pays to have a dedicated time for reading, and other time for work. Reading too much will numb your brain. Use the time for work to either explore the concepts in your own system or to try the exercises. Don't be a perfectionist but don't be eager to finish them. Come ask questions in lainchan. Use your search engine. Try to answer your own questions based on what you read before asking for help. There are videos on just about anything these days. Every so often review what you k ow about the topic. You don't have to remember every single thing; the main effort should be spent recognizing the most important aspects and how they fit together. Drink lots of water, eat nuts and raisins.

>>30627 Think if you can emigrate to teh UK or something like that and do some job like dishwashing or storehouse worker for a year to earn money for proper education in that country. I at least hope they taught you some proper mathematics there? If nope - this univ sounds like a fuarrrking waste of your time.

Not even because it is from a third world country, a bunch of universities fill classes with bullshit, sadly the dogma of having a degree on your CV to prove we know is ingrained into the average NPC. T. student from a 3rd world country that went into Bristol and got profoundly depressed after seeing the bullshit curriculum. And to be honest, experience on real life work is way more different, I would recommend you only to stay on CS if you wish to stay on the academic field, anything else, get a shorter degree and jump in, learn CS from outside if you wish so much, there will be no deadlines and you will be able to learn at your own pace.

>>30628 I'm glad if my post can help others. >>30629 Thanks took notes of that process I'm gonna apply it to the book with the rainbow diagram, to catch up what I was meant to learn in that architecture class >>30630 Nah I don't think I can migrate My precalc class was good, but that was before Covid, after Covid the rest of my math classes were half assed Thanks to that I have to catch up on linear algebra and calculus I too :/ >>30632 I got into a short (one year) mobile development program, should I focus on that? They will give me a degree but the problem is that the program is even worse! And I don't know how to start mobile dev on my own (I know Java and C++, but, how do I make apps without android Studio? It's absolutely bloated, I just have a regular Thinkpad and it's specs are insane) And I have low motivation to study today, almost got killed in a mugging ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The quintessential 3rd world experience

>>30633 Excellent choice of a book. Hope you're doing fine. Use that as motivation to get a good job and away from dangerous places. Peace

i learned a lot from handmade hero https://guide.handmadehero.org/intro-to-c/ https://guide.handmadehero.org/code/

If you're like me you learn by doing. Find a subject your interested in, see what kind of projects is in it, and do that. Otherwise, even if you read the books, you would forget

>>30628 Yes. Basically, you have two choices: >Go to website of an University and see what classes/books they have >or use a random curriculum you found online: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science Get the recommended books (or use the book threads) and use YouTube (check out channels like MIT OpenCourseWare and 3Blue1Brown) the tl;dr version is that you need to learn precalculus, calculus and linear algebra (probably also some discrete math and a bit of number theory), a programming language (universities often teach C# or Java, and nowadays also Python), algorithms and data structures (and stuff like Big O notation/asymptotic notation). The rest depends on what kind of specialization the you chose (web development or embedded, etc.) I recommend you also learn C, SQL, basics of GNU/Linux and the basics of statistics/probability.

>>30633 i think you should change school. If you finish bad school and will be embarassed by it like me, chances are reputation of school is not good at all, so people will always regard you as worse than you if you apply to job, even if you get a job... Focus more on mobile program, i understand they pay you for some dev in learning, or internship? If you get few years of experience and will have lot to talk about commercial experience and popular stack at that, maybe people wont judge you by your degree. But better degree means more opportunities for sure, especially there is ton of people in basic CRUD engineering, lot of competition, job is not elitist at all

>>30627 Unironically doing a soykafty tech program in college to satisfy my overbearing parents. It actually helped me far more than SCIP because it forced me to splatter my mind with the basics of programming langauges. With SCIP I'd just get bored and lose interest for a bit, but with college the fear of not getting my money's worth made me actually bother with somewhat learning the material. It may have also helped that it was a beginner course and basically spoonfed you what you needed to do with some easy exercises. That said it actually did improve my understanding of programming since before college I was relying on a friend who was a professional programmer at some corp to give me tips and advice - most of the advice and tips were pointless and he had basically no awareness of concepts like 'interpreted vs compiled', etc, that most beginner guides saddle you with. Problem was that he'd also choose the most roundabout ways of explaining soykaf to you, to the point that he'd make them seem far more complicated than they actually were. So, all in all college taught me the very fundamentals far more effectively than I could myself. Namely that programming's all about creating functions that help you make more complex functions, and that everything is a function, etc, etc, soykaf that could probably be explained in much less time but never actually gets explained for some godforsaken reason - basically I've come to realize that programming probably ISN'T that difficult to get to grips with, it's just that people tend to overcomplicate it with technobabble instead of just telling you "Most modern programming languages have similar syntax that allow you to more or less transfer over your skills. People who are experts in a specific language are those who are most used to each language's specific syntax quirks and features." Anyways, OP, sorry for blogposting. Hope you breeze through your classes and get your goddamn degree. This soykaf's basically pointless all my non-programming classes were taught by indians and arabs who either could barely be coherent in english or were so old that they were almost deaf and screamed everything out while coughing their lungs out with phlegm. Haha

>>31083 I think you guys just go to really bad universities. You definitely learn a lot more at a well ranked school (i.e. T50 or under). In addition I do not think programming is as easy as you guys say. The population here is an elite subsample. People here are probably just more competent than the average student at their school because they go out of their way in their free time to talk about CS or programming.

>>31084 eh, the only real thing you get from well ranked universities is better resources in the form of: tutors, better proffs, better assignments, better libraries, computer labs, etc - but this stuff is not required really. when you zoom out and think about it for a second, all the syllabuses for the courses are more or less the same. the learning objectives from a computer architecture class at MIT is going to be the same as from a random state school. so no matter where you go, you're going to be learning the same stuff but with different instructors, slides, maybe course textbooks. moreover, if you're willing to do some googling, you will find entire course outlines - which give you steps to learning a topic - assignments, past exams, etc from other universities. what this effectively means is you can self learn anything by using the good resources too. its all effort at the end of the day.

>>31816 Grad of a T10 university here. Honestly, in some regards, you get a worse education because some Profs. just want to do research and don't really want to help undergrads. If I were to give advice, I'd recommend going to a school that is completely focused on quality of instruction to undergrads.

>>30627 I just want to say, it's the same in a first-world supposedly "top 100" university. First year was spent learning Java and SQL, in a very superficial way, and zero theory. In the second semester of the second year, finally we start learning something nice, boolean algebra. In general though, everything we've covered I already know, and I'm sure many other know already too. It's just so basic and nothing you can't learn by just watching a 30 minute youtube video. I was talking with a friend that went to another university, and he apparently started off learning Haskell, so that's something I suppose. Basically, what I've done, is to just buy books and read them. Buying something makes me not want to "waste" them. But anyway, honestly just starting up a project and doing some stuff online here and there already makes me much better than most people. Otherwise joining a uni club I suppose but I'm too shy for that. If I had a chance, I would move to another city where the quality of life is better than this soykafhole, and my life enjoyment would be much better, even if the quality of education was the same. I probably value that far more than education because, I mean, I can always just learn online, like I have been for the past 20 years. Anyway I just wanted to vent. fuarrrk it, it's the University of Western Australia. I feel bad for all the foreign students scammed to study here.

>>32140 My university starts people off with either python or Haskell. I'm not sure which is the choice now, but our ProgLang group are all Haskell nuts.

>>32140 Just talk to Max Ward, guy's a Chad.

>>32140 >fuarrrk it, it's the University of Western Australia. I feel bad for all the foreign students scammed to study here. Sup cunt, I'm stuck in RMIT at smellbourne. They're doing this new program here where they have these bootcamp/studio classes all for the first year doing Java as well, the only other classes is basic discrete mathematics and AI foundations. Now I hope you get back to me on this, I've found a very peculiar phenomenen, and that is that almost nobody else in this course has done programming before. In particular, nothing non-webdev, if somebody does have experience it's with something like JS or a JS framework. Before this if you told me that somebody applied to a CS course without having done more than a Python Hello World, I'd think you're joking. But in fact, most of this cohort has that or less, and here they are in this $24k course thinking that computers are their true passion because they play videogames all day. On one hand I feel quite secure in my future position, and in fact it motivates me to be more competitive and push harder. I had a lot of nerves going in because I did terrible in HS, had a lower selection rank than the lowest picked last year even, so obviously everyone going in is international or a high-level domestic student, and will likely be leagues above me. But nah, it's really the opposite. What about you? Or is WA full of smarter cookies than Dicktoria?

>>35004 >nobody else in this course has done programming before. I was in a T10-20 in Brazil, and then realised it was soykaf and changed to a T200 that teaches me better. In both cases, but specially the prior, the exact same thing happens here during the first period. A lot of people dont even give a soykaf about computers or know much about them, they just want a high-paying job. WIth that said, i must admit that i, myself, ironically have never programmed before getting into uni. But i had spent a lot of time reading code, watching people code for games and web pages, and read a lot about topics such as cyber-security, programming employment, what people use each language for, and in OP's case, soykafty CS curriculums.

>>32140 >UWA Programming courses are the same here at UQ. Its all about teaching a language, never about abstract programming concepts and software design. At least the intro embedded course was a little better. Luckily I'm doing EE and can skip most of it. >>35004 I have seen too many self professed "programmers" that have done nothing outside of what is required for assignments and still struggle with some basic concepts and even just simple problem solving. Had to do group work for an electrical practical, an optional part was to modify the program on the arduino to introduce an echo on the output (it was sampling an input signal and reproducing it with some processing on output). The guy who had everything set up on his laptop and was keen to do the programming just opened the file, stared then started making random changes not achieving everything. I tried explaining the 3 line solution to him and even wrote and tested it myself in front of him but he just didn't get it and insisted I was wrong. I've had absent team members just ignore the notes I give them and write a program that produces completely the wrong output to fit in with the rest of the project. I'm pretty sure the problem is the horrible teaching style for programming that is littered everywhere.