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More on Joel Spolsky's College Advice


Jon Galloway's posting on why 'Joel got it wrong' has made me rethink Joel's College Advice. I had added to Joel's advice earlier on but I too don't think that 'C' in particular, is the correct choice. The emphasis really must be on *'Data structures and Algorithms' . Why? The most critical CS course, in my opinion, is *DS-A. Usually, this is a sophmore course in college and taught after a course or two of structured language programming (these may be Pascal, Java, C# or even C/C++). The *DS-A course is the foundation and a pre-requisite for most other CS courses - compilers, databases, networks, automata, etc.

If a student is very familiar with Pascal, Java or C then getting into another structured language is almost trivial (quite a few C++ programmers claim that they got into Java/C# over a week-end).

So, in terms of 'College Advice' - I would recommend taking a *DS-A course (and the near-mastery of a structured language would be presumed). *DS-A courses make better programmers (eventually better developers & architects) who go on to write systems with fewer bugs and thus, obviating the need for bug-tracking tools. ;-)
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Posted: Feb 16 2005, 08:35 AM by SB Chatterjee | with 1 comment(s)
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