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> ..Lynda​.com, which reaches more than 4 million people a year with its how-to tutorials online in everything from management skills to programming. Now we kn

• nkozyra 12y ago
  It depends on the individual. There are plenty of driven people who want to know the absolute most they can, and won't stop once they're able to generate applications. There are then plenty of others who get something to "work" and call it a day. But that's not restricted to self-learners. You can do the absolute minimum in college, too. Not to mention all of the things that you learn but don't apply after graduation, if you're taking specific classes and don't work directly in OS design or algorithms, that fades pretty quickly. More importantly, CS programs don't spend a ton of time on the programming itself, so to some degree you have to be a self-learner even at a college-level CS program.
  • wongarsu 12y ago
    All other thing being equal, the CS grad is much more likely to know the advantages and disadvantages of using a heap than a self taught programmer. At least in my CS program you can't get away without getting a decent exposure to algorithm design and theoretical computer science. You can on the other hand easily learn programming without ever touching these subjects.
• dragonwriter 12y ago
  Lots of people long before the age of web tutorials wee self taught programmers from books that didn't focus on academic computer science, or even -- especially in the 80s and earlier -- from particular product manuals. Many of these people have been gainfully employed using their programming skills. While academic computer science is certainly useful for programming in industry, and some parts of it are essential to some jobs, not everyone programming needs a computer science degree or equivalent coverage in less-formal education.
  • RonaldK 12y ago
    Agree. Young people tend to get skills from youtube and online rather from academic institutions. But the dicipline and focus to my mind cannot be learnt online.
• MollyR 12y ago
  Some of Lynda's lectures on the Fundamentals of Computer Science are great. I used them quite a bit in college, because my cs professors were horrible at teaching.
• LordKano 12y ago
  I used to work with a completely self-taught programmer. He was very good in his area of focus but once he got outside of his narrow area, the consequences of his lack of education became extremely clear. He didn't have any understanding of how the stack operated or how I, a college student at the time, could write code that executed significantly faster than his.
  • andrewvc 12y ago
    I have worked with and interviewed a ton of CS grads who couldn't tell you how the stack worked, what a linked list is, or compare the complexity of a hash lookup vs a b-tree lookup. I'd say something like 80% of the ones I've met fall in that category. This has been pretty frustrating to me, because I am fully self taught and I know that stuff. Additionally, your comment overlooks the fact that much of what is taught in college is really ancillary to what a programmer does most days. It's nice to know, but I'd say that most CS grads learn enough to pass tests then promptly forget it. Then, they get a job, and learn a bunch of stuff that wasn't taught in college that actually is useful. Seems like a waste of time to me. Why teach people stuff that 90% of them forget? The only reason I learned this stuff is because I found it interesting, and I learned that while making money instead of going into debt taking on student loans.
    • mgkimsal 12y ago
      hear hear... in the same boat and same experience with CS folks. The ones who 'get it' are really good, but many (most?) don't really fall in to that camp. But the same is true for self-taught folks too. There's a (growing?) divide between "cs" and "programming" and it really bugs me that people are assumed to be better at "programming" because of a CS degree. CS knowledge isn't irrelevant, but it's not always relevant to many aspects of actual day to day programming either. Perhaps it's sort of "arelevant"?
    • LordKano 12y ago
      For financial reasons, I did two years at a community college before I went to a University and my programming courses at the community college covered far more of the underlying mechanisms of program execution than any of my university courses. Just to make sure we understood how they worked, we had to make our own linked list objects and then write functions to traverse them. It turns out that by saving money at a community college, I actually got a better education than I otherwise would have.
• jasode 12y ago
  >, I can't help feeling that someone who, for example, learns how to program using a Lynda.com online course, is missing out on a lot of things (e.g. the underlying principles of computer science) that are taught as part of a full academic course of study I think you're misinterpreting the article. You're looking backwards at lynda.com, Khan Academy, etc and biased by their current incarnation of not having comprehensive CS foundation topics. Instead, the article is looking forward and speculating that trends may be changing. One has to look at those online education alternatives as something that may gain relevance (and possibly prestige too). The journalist was using # of masters degrees as one possible indicator of this changing trend. (It's too early to tell and the journalist may be overstating the evidence.) For example, when Harvard was started in 1600s, it was primarily a school to train ministers and clergymen. If someone said in 1675, "trends may be changing, and new schools like Harvard might teach the next generation of lawyers and businessmen", a colonial person that looked at the world as only a static snapshot would have been skeptical. He'd insist that a young man must apprentice at some workshop to learn business skills. Harvard is that weird place that makes you study the Bible in Latin forwards and backwards. But indeed, Harvard did "change" and ~200 years later, they added a law school and ~300 years later, they added a business school. Now, "Harvard Law School" and "Harvard Business School" have overtaken "Harvard Divinity School" in terms of mindshare. We can't predict what will happen with Lynda.com and others but I'm sure they won't take 200 years to figure out how to expand their scope in hopes of making themselves more relevant. Time will tell how society responds. Is Khan Academy, Lynda.com, etc the "Harvard of the 1600s"? If not, what's stopping it?