5 ms·

Tech Prep by Facebook

81 points by fahimulhaq 11y ago

pboutros 11y ago
Interesting that it's tied in with McKinsey & Co. Without having dug into it much, I quite like it. There are definitely a lot of resources out there to learn, and - regardless of how true it is - feeling like a resource is the _right_ one for you probably helps.
superskierpat 11y ago
As cool as this is, It would be nice if choosing the expert path would also offer links to recommended books on programming. I've personally found books like sicp, the c++ programming language and etc to be the best source of programming knowledge (after an appropriate math or programming intro). But it's often pretty hard to find out which books are worth reading, of all the books that have been published in the last 30 years, are any still germaine to modern programming? I tend to prefer books because just listening to a video about something does not work for me (especially when it's just a guy talking), a book with a bunch of exercices and ideally a corriger really allows you to learn at your leasure (and are much more portable than a video on a mooc site)
laurentoget 11y ago
I wish they had involved ACM and IEEE in it instead of doing their own thing.
sotojuan 11y ago
This was pretty cool and seems great for young beginners. I wonder, though, what is the modern equivalent of messing with BASIC after school? It certainly isn't Coding for Dummies is it? Would it be messing with the browser console? Messing with Python? On a side note, I still think the beginning of the first SICP lecture is the best introduction to Comp Sci (I watch it to get motivated/inspired sometimes!). What got me into Comp Sci and programming was Ableson's quote: > So as opposed to other kinds of engineering, where the constraints on what you can build are the constraints of physical systems . . . the constraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds. Just made it feel limitless, because it really can be. Also I am surprised that for "Expert" they recommend Coursera, edX, Udacity... but no books. In my experience, most "video courses" tend to be aimed at beginners or intermediates, with a few awesome exceptions like the Algorithms courses in Coursera and some on edX. Still though, I believe the most interesting and "Expert"-level knowledge of Comp Sci and programming is in dead tree format. But I guess it's hard to pick a few books to recommend.
- superskierpat 11y ago
  I just sent them an email suggesting this :)
- taf2 11y ago
  I just remember the one c programming book I spent hours reading memorizing the std libraries... All of the string functions and how I'd write int main over and over again...
- truncate 11y ago
  In my opinion a modern equivalent of messing with programming at school would be Racket. There are couple of awesome books `Realm of Racket`[1] and `How to Design Program`. Realm of Racket introduce programming by writing games. Its actually very easy to write interactive programs with this framework called big-bang. Matthias Felleison recently spoke about it on Strange Loop[3] Unlike BASIC though, Racket no toy language. It's very powerful and expressive. Its a Scheme dialect btw. I occasionally spend some time contributing to a Racket-JS compiler called Whalsong. Whatever games you write in Racket using big-bang can run on your browser. Checkout some examples here http://bigbang.ccs.neu.edu/search?q=%23stevelikes http://bigbang.ccs.neu.edu/search?q=%23stevelikes [1] http://www.amazon.com/Realm-Racket-Learn-Program-Game/dp/1593274912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445487500&sr=8-1&keywords=realm+of+racket http://www.amazon.com/Realm-Racket-Learn-Program-Game/dp/159... [2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayoofXuKqMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayoofXuKqMY
- zachrose 11y ago
  I would hope it's messing with the browser console. Most "learn to code" literature that I come across still seems focused on unixy input-output type programs. I think there's an underestimated market of people who would be interested in programming if it were easier to see where the rubber hits the road and "programs" become "software." Being able to deconstruct what would otherwise be a sleek and opaque media experience seems like a good place to start with that.
  - gedrap 11y ago
saurabhjha 11y ago
That's really cool.
gtrubetskoy 11y ago
I wonder why there exists "computer science" but not "finance science" or "air conditioning science" or "automotive science". It makes me doubt that computer science is really a thing. Algorithms, logic, computation, electronics are covered by other more fundamental "sciences" such as mathematics, statistics, physics, etc. Is computation really justified as a scientific discipline of its own?
- sotojuan 11y ago
  https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=28 https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=28
- ngorski 11y ago
  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  "Finance science" would probably be economics. HVAC and automotive engineering are intermediary disciplines that involve facets from various science and engineering fields. That the software industry is anti-scientific does not mean there is not a computer science.
- tensor 11y ago
  Many in the field consider it more math than engineering. It's arguably not a science though, we don't make hypotheses and don't do experiments.
  - executesorder66 11y ago
    I don't make many hypotheses, but I do a shit load of experiments.
  - Shish2k 11y ago
    > we don't make hypotheses and don't do experiments. I don't formally write them down (unless it's a particularly complex case), but during debugging and performance tweaking I find myself making hypotheses and experiments all the time (according to the lay definitions of those words, at least)
throwitallaway1 11y ago
With Facebook's Tech Prep, you too can create shiny monstrosities that chug while trying to scroll on an i7 with the very latest JS engine! It's tied in with McKinsey because they hate programmers. They hate the fact that the firms they're raiding and "advising" are currently having to pay people a living wage to build and fix their systems. They want to flood the market with a bunch of cheap framework cut-and-paste developers and flood the culture with a bunch of inch-deep strivers [1]. Meanwhile, the McKinsey always-be-closing Powerpoint jockeys will bring the "real ideas". Does somebody have to keep bringing this up every time one of these "get people who never bothered to understand programming on their own to understand programming" articles gets posted? [1] Disclaimer: I am merely foot-deep.
- pinewurst 11y ago
  I was "blessed" enough to see one of their engagements - the young Bob and Bob McKinseys. So much money, so little results. Which prompts me to recommend my favorite book on management consulting, the life, the legends, the myths: http://www.amazon.com/Management-Myth-Debunking-Business-Philosophy/dp/0393338525/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445487698&sr=1-1&keywords=management+myth+stewart http://www.amazon.com/Management-Myth-Debunking-Business-Phi...
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    just found it via a search of "management myth ebook". Thanks for the recommendation, I'll be reading this one tonight.
- MarkPNeyer 11y ago
  the awesome thing about this is that every bad engineer creates a job for two good ones!
outliers 11y ago
Why do they have to make these videos so cheesy.
icewater 11y ago
For intermediate programmers they are recommending a terrible book full of fake reviews by a scammy author (I purchased the book earlier in the year and returned it). Were any of these recommendations vetted? The book... http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Success-Day-Beginners-Efficient-ebook/dp/B00Q3Y55PM/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Success-Day-Beginners-Effi...
- matthewbauer 11y ago
  That's too bad. Is there any way to report stuff like that to Amazon?
- envy2 11y ago
  This seems bad, thanks for flagging. I'll try to track down how/why this got recommended.
anonymouscow0 11y ago
Given recent other posts about trying to get women and minorities in to tech the first thing I saw was the background marketing. Facebook is very good with data and I wonder if they can quantify a positive result. It felt forced, I didn't even notice the text I just kept scrolling around looking at all the photos. I didn't see anyone that looked like me, it all felt too social and nothing at all like programming. Not one felt cubicle, nothing I've seen over years of coding. How did it make you feel?
- awfullyjohn 11y ago
  I think that's the point.
- wetmore 11y ago
  Considering I've spent my life seeing people that looked like me everywhere I look in the field of CS, I'm happy there's an effort to highlight the fact that CS also includes people who _don't_ look like me. I think the coding community has been effectively convincing people like you and me to pick up coding for years now. This website is a great initiative to convince the types of people we haven't been effectively reaching.
- crazyjosh 11y ago
  I agree with the forced feeling. Also odd to me, looking through the "Community & Events" there aren't any opportunities listed for a white males. Every organization and event listed is for women and minorities.
  - wahnfrieden 11y ago
    White males are not already an underserved demographic. White men don't need yet another resource catered to them; tech is already doing a fantastic job of being full of them.
lsiebert 11y ago
There is something weird about saying 18-25+.
k_bx 11y ago
Isn't that.. awful? Computer science is not about computers, it's not about code either. It's about ideas! Ideas, related to computations. Here is a great Ted-talk from Simon Peyton Jones that explains this very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia55clAtdMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia55clAtdMs

81 points by fahimulhaq 11y ago

Interesting that it's tied in with McKinsey & Co. Without having dug into it much, I quite like it. There are definitely a lot of resources out there to learn, and - regardless of how true it is - feeling like a resource is the _right_ one for you probably helps.

superskierpat 11y ago

As cool as this is, It would be nice if choosing the expert path would also offer links to recommended books on programming. I've personally found books like sicp, the c++ programming language and etc to be the best source of programming knowledge (after an appropriate math or programming intro). But it's often pretty hard to find out which books are worth reading, of all the books that have been published in the last 30 years, are any still germaine to modern programming? I tend to prefer books because just listening to a video about something does not work for me (especially when it's just a guy talking), a book with a bunch of exercices and ideally a corriger really allows you to learn at your leasure (and are much more portable than a video on a mooc site)

laurentoget 11y ago

I wish they had involved ACM and IEEE in it instead of doing their own thing.

sotojuan 11y ago

This was pretty cool and seems great for young beginners. I wonder, though, what is the modern equivalent of messing with BASIC after school? It certainly isn't Coding for Dummies is it? Would it be messing with the browser console? Messing with Python? On a side note, I still think the beginning of the first SICP lecture is the best introduction to Comp Sci (I watch it to get motivated/inspired sometimes!). What got me into Comp Sci and programming was Ableson's quote: > So as opposed to other kinds of engineering, where the constraints on what you can build are the constraints of physical systems . . . the constraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds. Just made it feel limitless, because it really can be. Also I am surprised that for "Expert" they recommend Coursera, edX, Udacity... but no books. In my experience, most "video courses" tend to be aimed at beginners or intermediates, with a few awesome exceptions like the Algorithms courses in Coursera and some on edX. Still though, I believe the most interesting and "Expert"-level knowledge of Comp Sci and programming is in dead tree format. But I guess it's hard to pick a few books to recommend.

superskierpat 11y ago
I just sent them an email suggesting this :)
taf2 11y ago
I just remember the one c programming book I spent hours reading memorizing the std libraries... All of the string functions and how I'd write int main over and over again...
truncate 11y ago
In my opinion a modern equivalent of messing with programming at school would be Racket. There are couple of awesome books `Realm of Racket`[1] and `How to Design Program`. Realm of Racket introduce programming by writing games. Its actually very easy to write interactive programs with this framework called big-bang. Matthias Felleison recently spoke about it on Strange Loop[3] Unlike BASIC though, Racket no toy language. It's very powerful and expressive. Its a Scheme dialect btw. I occasionally spend some time contributing to a Racket-JS compiler called Whalsong. Whatever games you write in Racket using big-bang can run on your browser. Checkout some examples here http://bigbang.ccs.neu.edu/search?q=%23stevelikes http://bigbang.ccs.neu.edu/search?q=%23stevelikes [1] http://www.amazon.com/Realm-Racket-Learn-Program-Game/dp/1593274912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445487500&sr=8-1&keywords=realm+of+racket http://www.amazon.com/Realm-Racket-Learn-Program-Game/dp/159... [2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayoofXuKqMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayoofXuKqMY
zachrose 11y ago
I would hope it's messing with the browser console. Most "learn to code" literature that I come across still seems focused on unixy input-output type programs. I think there's an underestimated market of people who would be interested in programming if it were easier to see where the rubber hits the road and "programs" become "software." Being able to deconstruct what would otherwise be a sleek and opaque media experience seems like a good place to start with that.
- gedrap 11y ago

saurabhjha 11y ago

That's really cool.

gtrubetskoy 11y ago

I wonder why there exists "computer science" but not "finance science" or "air conditioning science" or "automotive science". It makes me doubt that computer science is really a thing. Algorithms, logic, computation, electronics are covered by other more fundamental "sciences" such as mathematics, statistics, physics, etc. Is computation really justified as a scientific discipline of its own?

sotojuan 11y ago
https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=28 https://youtu.be/2Op3QLzMgSY?t=28
ngorski 11y ago
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
"Finance science" would probably be economics. HVAC and automotive engineering are intermediary disciplines that involve facets from various science and engineering fields. That the software industry is anti-scientific does not mean there is not a computer science.
tensor 11y ago
Many in the field consider it more math than engineering. It's arguably not a science though, we don't make hypotheses and don't do experiments.
- executesorder66 11y ago
  I don't make many hypotheses, but I do a shit load of experiments.
- Shish2k 11y ago
  > we don't make hypotheses and don't do experiments. I don't formally write them down (unless it's a particularly complex case), but during debugging and performance tweaking I find myself making hypotheses and experiments all the time (according to the lay definitions of those words, at least)

throwitallaway1 11y ago

With Facebook's Tech Prep, you too can create shiny monstrosities that chug while trying to scroll on an i7 with the very latest JS engine! It's tied in with McKinsey because they hate programmers. They hate the fact that the firms they're raiding and "advising" are currently having to pay people a living wage to build and fix their systems. They want to flood the market with a bunch of cheap framework cut-and-paste developers and flood the culture with a bunch of inch-deep strivers [1]. Meanwhile, the McKinsey always-be-closing Powerpoint jockeys will bring the "real ideas". Does somebody have to keep bringing this up every time one of these "get people who never bothered to understand programming on their own to understand programming" articles gets posted? [1] Disclaimer: I am merely foot-deep.

pinewurst 11y ago
I was "blessed" enough to see one of their engagements - the young Bob and Bob McKinseys. So much money, so little results. Which prompts me to recommend my favorite book on management consulting, the life, the legends, the myths: http://www.amazon.com/Management-Myth-Debunking-Business-Philosophy/dp/0393338525/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445487698&sr=1-1&keywords=management+myth+stewart http://www.amazon.com/Management-Myth-Debunking-Business-Phi...
- anonbanker 11y ago
  just found it via a search of "management myth ebook". Thanks for the recommendation, I'll be reading this one tonight.
MarkPNeyer 11y ago
the awesome thing about this is that every bad engineer creates a job for two good ones!

outliers 11y ago

Why do they have to make these videos so cheesy.

icewater 11y ago

For intermediate programmers they are recommending a terrible book full of fake reviews by a scammy author (I purchased the book earlier in the year and returned it). Were any of these recommendations vetted? The book... http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Success-Day-Beginners-Efficient-ebook/dp/B00Q3Y55PM/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Success-Day-Beginners-Effi...

matthewbauer 11y ago
That's too bad. Is there any way to report stuff like that to Amazon?
envy2 11y ago
This seems bad, thanks for flagging. I'll try to track down how/why this got recommended.

anonymouscow0 11y ago

Given recent other posts about trying to get women and minorities in to tech the first thing I saw was the background marketing. Facebook is very good with data and I wonder if they can quantify a positive result. It felt forced, I didn't even notice the text I just kept scrolling around looking at all the photos. I didn't see anyone that looked like me, it all felt too social and nothing at all like programming. Not one felt cubicle, nothing I've seen over years of coding. How did it make you feel?

awfullyjohn 11y ago
I think that's the point.
wetmore 11y ago
Considering I've spent my life seeing people that looked like me everywhere I look in the field of CS, I'm happy there's an effort to highlight the fact that CS also includes people who _don't_ look like me. I think the coding community has been effectively convincing people like you and me to pick up coding for years now. This website is a great initiative to convince the types of people we haven't been effectively reaching.
crazyjosh 11y ago
I agree with the forced feeling. Also odd to me, looking through the "Community & Events" there aren't any opportunities listed for a white males. Every organization and event listed is for women and minorities.
- wahnfrieden 11y ago
  White males are not already an underserved demographic. White men don't need yet another resource catered to them; tech is already doing a fantastic job of being full of them.

lsiebert 11y ago

There is something weird about saying 18-25+.

k_bx 11y ago

Isn't that.. awful? Computer science is not about computers, it's not about code either. It's about ideas! Ideas, related to computations. Here is a great Ted-talk from Simon Peyton Jones that explains this very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia55clAtdMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia55clAtdMs