Help. Trying to become excellent at programming.

[Aikouka]

i remember taking discrete math in college and it being the "weed out" course for my major. back then i had no clue how the hell this pertained to comp sci, but now i clearly see the benefit of it. it gets you thinking in a different way and is more logical than anything. that kind of math is huge in programming.

I'm surprised that discrete math was the weed-out course. I thought discrete was much easier than Calculus II. I also think it's one of the few "higher maths" that I use in daily life. Things like nCr and nPr are fairly useful... if you don't mix them up. 😛 Speaking of Calc II, I still can't figure out why I didn't do well in that class. Don't get me wrong as I did fine, but I didn't get an A. What made it strange was that my friend would ask me to explain things, and I would do so with no problems, yet he always beat me on tests. 🙁

there's a reason why CS classes don't actually teach languages (aside from your first CS class.) you design the algorithm, then implement it in any language you choose. hell, the book 'The Art of Computer Programming' explains the algorithms using a fake programming language.

Were you actually able to code projects in whatever language you wanted? I think the only course I had where that was an option was my capstone class at the end where we essentially mimicked the development cycle. For me, the intro computer science class was taught in Java and everything else was in C++. There were a few courses that may have used something random like MIPS Assembly in our architecture course or LISP in the AI course.

My favorite course was actually Automata because we mostly just designed FSMs. It was rather interesting to quickly and visibly see the difference in how people tackled problems. I recall one of our assignments where I solved a problem using around 20 nodes, and the person next to me was over double that. I think it was a FSM for a vending machine or something like that.

I tend to use matrix algebra quite a bit, but i'm a statistical programmer, so that's to be expected.

Yeah, it really just depends on what you do, and if I had to guess, you probably use a lot of libraries to handle the linear algebra stuff?

 

[CurseTheSky]

Learn the semantics, not the syntax.

IMO, pick something that you're passionate about, do some research, find what language would be best suited for it, and start with some simple examples. If you're really passionate about it, you will find it much easier to stick with, and every little victory will be a huge confidence boost. Conversely, if you were to simply start your search with "Java for enterprise" or something to that fact, you would probably be bored to tears before you actually made anything significant.

Don't worry about what the language is. A language's syntax is something that you can find on Google. Being a good programmer means knowing the ins and outs of what you can and can't do, and knowing how something with affect a project as a whole.

 

[purbeast0]

I'm surprised that discrete math was the weed-out course. I thought discrete was much easier than Calculus II. I also think it's one of the few "higher maths" that I use in daily life. Things like nCr and nPr are fairly useful... if you don't mix them up. 😛 Speaking of Calc II, I still can't figure out why I didn't do well in that class. Don't get me wrong as I did fine, but I didn't get an A. What made it strange was that my friend would ask me to explain things, and I would do so with no problems, yet he always beat me on tests. 🙁

i took calc2 my first semester in college (ap'd out of calc1 in highschool) and got a b in it i think. discrete math was a 2nd year course for us. i took it my 4th semester in college and yeah, it was definitely the weed out course. but i also think they made it particularly tough on purpose.

to give you an idea of how ridiculous it was, the average on the final was a 30. i got a 35 if i remember correctly.

i also remember they gave you 5 points for just putting your name on the test. there were rumors of at least one 0 on the test. one of my roomates at the time dropped out of comp sci major after that year due to that class.

 

[radtechtips]

Tehe I'm ap'ing of calc 1 and 2 as a junior in HS 🙂

 

[purbeast0]

Tehe I'm ap'ing of calc 1 and 2 as a junior in HS 🙂

yeah that's good. i've heard that they are basically a year ahead now for math in the schools i grew up in. i was always at the top of my math classes and took the highest possible math courses i could through highschool.

i was talking to my nephews who say that i think geometry and algebra 2 now are being taught as the smart math classes in middle school. algebra was the highest i could take in middle school, with ap calc being the highest i could take in hs.

 

[zoiks]

I used to be bad at programming.Now, I'm fairly good although I don't write code as quick as some others do. I really started loving programming when I got into Python. I did a lot of perl stuff before it but Python is the first programming language that I found myself looking forward to code in.