

Ask HN: What Should I Focus on Learning Over the Summer? - JCordeiro

I'm currently finishing up my first year of college for software engineering and I plan on taking the initiative to learn on my own over the course of the summer.<p>My question is: What should I focus on learning over the summer?<p>The one thing I know I do not want to learn is Java, as it is the one language I am already familiar with, and will continue learning when I return to school in the fall. I'm interested in developing for the web, but my goal is to just become a more knowledgeable, and better developer/programming by the end of the summer. What do you guys suggest I do?
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MCompeau
Do the Udacity course on Web Application Engineering (CS253
[http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr20...](http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012)).
It just started a few days ago and goes for the next few weeks. It will likely
provide you with the baseline skills to build a small project of your own
before your next semester starts.

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JCordeiro
Thanks a lot for this reply. I just checked it out and it seems great! There
are a ton of cool classes on this site.

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jiganti
I'll second this. Udacity has the best courses I've taken for CS stuff.

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msluyter
I recommend exploring your day to day tool set. By that I mean things like
your text editor / IDE, various OS features/hotkeys, the unix command prompt,
scripting languages, etc...

If you have some spare cycles and the motivation, focused learning on such
things can pay off a _lot_ in the future.

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dieselz
Figure out a niche market opportunity that could generate revenue. Learn
whatever skills you need to to build that product. Aim for break even by the
end of the summer.

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pasbesoin
Depending upon your current familiarity with them, read Jeffrey Friedl's
O'Reilly book on regular expressions.

<http://regex.info/>

Something to fill the odd moments or hours, unless it becomes a page-turner
for you, as it did for me.

