7 ms·
The courses that were mentioned were all 100 level courses. Can anyone who went to Stanford(or knows the courses) comment on how technical they actually are?
by cube13 16y ago
The courses that were mentioned were all 100 level courses. Can anyone who went to Stanford(or knows the courses) comment on how technical they actually are?
It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.
- wmf 16y agoCome on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel? Fortunately, they created a search engine that let me find the class in question: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ It's Java programming.
- cube13 16y ago>Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel? Intro, non-technical course? These are more common than you think. CS105(https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus) at UIUC is a course that covers exactly that(it was 101 when I went there). It's meant for non-engineering or science students to cover a general education credit. CS101(which was 105) is in C and matlab, and that covers some more techincally difficult stuff. This is meant for technical non-CS majors. CS125 is the true intro CS course, which covers data structures, recursion, etc.
- wmf 16y agoThat sounds pretty sad; I wonder why that class isn't in the MIS department or something.
- cube13 16y agoKeep in mind that neither 101 or 105 actually count towards a CS degree in any capacity(either major or minor), so those aren't courses that anyone getting a CS degree would take anyway.
- pnmahoney 16y agoyeahhhhhh.... i think they would get Eric Roberts to teach a fucking class on Word/Excel. That sounds completely reasonable. to clarify: 106a is java, basically an intro to OO stuff and 106b is C++, getting into data structures, etc.
- emily37 16y agoAll the 106A/B/X classes are a good 10-20 hours of programming per week, and I know many people who were interested in CS but were scared off by the 106 series. There is a much less technical intro course, CS105, that's more of an introduction to computers rather than computer science, but I don't think this article is talking about that one.
- cbcase 16y agoThe first two classes (106A and 106B) are very techinical, though I'd hesitate to let anyone who hadn't taken classes beyond them to work on a piece of software I had control over. I think a good metric for classes is the final assignment, since it captures "how far" the class goes. For reference, the final assignments are: 106A --- It varies, but has recently been a text-based "Adventure"-style game (in Java) that requires tracking the map, player state, various objects and their capabilities, etc. I think there might also be a small graphical component. 106B/X --- Again, it varies, but the best assignment (in my view) is a BASIC interpreter that implements both a REPL and stored programs. All C++, it's about building a big list of abstract expressions of different types (assignment, etc) that can be executed by walking that list (taking advantage of dynamic dispatch) and tracking global program state. It's a nice intersection of data structures and (very simple) recursive descent parsing. 107 --- A heap allocator to implement malloc(), realloc(), and free(), written on top of mmap(). A fantastic assignment. So yeah, they're not trivial classes.